OR Humane and 10,000 Adoptions

OR Humane is on a big campaign to reach 10,000 adoptions this year. I suppose I'm not so impressed. I should be, I know.

I got an e-mail from SafeHaven a few days ago asking if I had any kittens up for adoption because Oregon Humane was looking for kittens. Now I know why. They had a goal to reach by years' end and needed highly adoptable animals to reach it.

That Wilsonville woman who briefly fostered Black Pearl would get on a list to take cats she rescued in to Oregon Humane every couple of months. I wouldn't let her take in Black Pearl. I made her promise she wouldn't. I'm so damn skeptical about the big shelters. She would pay $45 per cat, I think she said it was, to take in the cats she rescued, primarily from the trailer park where she lives, to OR Humane.

I would like to see all the small timers, the heartfelt little people rescues and rescuers go to heaven. A nice vacation for each would be nice in the meantime, however.

I'm glad Oregon Humane is adopting out 10,000 animals this year. It's a good accomplishment.

I'd be far more impressed if Oregon Humane had spayed and neutered 25,000 Oregon low income owned and feral cats. I'd just be super impressed then. I might even become a fan on Facebook then. But not until.

I still see the possibilities. I still think that sheltering a fraction of the aftermath of overpopulation is ineffective and inefficient and diverts the spotlight from the bright shining possibilities, of really solving the overpopulation issue with massive spay neutering.

It's a hard sell. People like to see the success stories at shelters. They like to go to shelters where they can literally wrap their arms around the overpopulation issue and hug it and take it home. They can lay out their money there, even when they know, if they thought about it, most of that money would be going into salaries, and utility bills and cleaning supplies.

Are they instead going to hand over their money to the handful of statewide cat trapper and cat wrangler groups, who are dirty by comparison, unsightly, often poor, without pulpits or accountants, rarely seen but talked about like they're nuts?

Only those with vivid imaginations or experiences will. The stories could be told, the stories that begin with two cats, one male and one female, and go on to the subsequent stories and fates of all the kittens born. The stories would include the costs and tragedies of all the tangents taken in the lives of those kittens, handed out to breed elsewhere, to be abandoned, to suffer, to produce more who suffer, and the people who chase after them, their heartbreaks and costs. People who can imagine this or have seen it do hand over their money to spay neuterers.

The story could be told in that manner. And at the end of all these tragic tales, born of two cats breeding originally, one could say, "But these horrible stories never really happened. Because, when the woman found the two cats her neighbor had left behind, the first thing she did was take the two cats, a boy and a girl, to the vet. They had their shots, were wormed, treated for fleas. And, they were spayed and neutered."

The story could be called "Animal Abuse and Suffering Stories of Summer 2009 That Never Occurred" Or something like that.

You get your happy fuzzy endings to wrap yourself up in, because you prevent the alternative in the first place. All you really need is an imagination, knowledge, or common sense. That's all.