Thirteen Facts About Katrina Cats

1. An estimated 250,000 pets were left behind during Hurricane Katrina.

2. This means that many of the strays running wild and free on the streets of New Orleans today were once someone's pet. I see stray dogs and cats every time I get in my car. It is very sad to imagine that they probably stopped waiting for their people to come back for them a long time ago.

3. There are, or were, over 4,000 food and water stations in the New Orleans metro area and the surrounding parishes. Tomorrow I'll go to the West Bank to cover about 45 of those. I sometimes ponder whether it does any good... but I saw kittens last week. And if they get used to coming where the food is, maybe they can be trapped... and get to go live somewhere safe where a person will pet them and they won't get attacked by feral dogs and their quality of life is better. Not only that, but it kills me to think that a cat who was once loved by someone is now starving to death and wondering what they did to deserve this.

4. TNR stands for Trap Neuter Return. This is a program in which stray and feral cats are systematically trapped, spayed or neutered, and returned to the streets or to colonies where someone makes sure they are fed.

5. Usually the vet will clip the cat's ear so it is easy to tell which ones have already been spayed/neutered. My cat has a tipped ear but as you can see he is still very handsome!

6. An unaltered female cat can produce 420,000 kittens in seven years (well, not personally, but through the generations). Isn't that crazy? So spay your cat!

7. With so many animals left on the streets after Katrina, we are already seeing the second generation of kittens.

8. Spaying and neutering strays cuts down on the amount of noise and nuisance; ie: they are less likely to be fighting and yowling under your window because they will not be mating.

9. Cats can be trapped humanely.

10. Someone I know caught 30 cats last week that had been sighted around various food/water stations. Adult strays can be resocialized and adopted, kittens can be adopted, and ferals can be fixed so they will no longer reproduce.

11. If you live in a disaster-prone area, have an evacuation plan for your pet. (Mine involves having a bunch of food/water, a carrier, a car, and experience sneaking illegal things into hotel rooms disguised as other things.)

12. You can also get your pet microchipped. Once you register the chip online, any vet anywhere can scan your pet's chip and bring up your contact information. The chip goes right between the shoulder blades.

13. Please consider adopting a cat from a shelter! I know I say this all the time, but just look how pretty my shelter cat is! :-) Buying from pet stores and backyard breeders just encourages people to be irresponsible with their pets and not spay or neuter them. 30% of shelter pets are purebred. This means somebody thought it would be "fun" to breed them, and then adopted them to people who they didn't do a background check on and who later dumped the pets in a shelter when they weren't cute babies anymore. This makes Jolee Bindo mad, and you don't want to make him mad, because he bites!

(I guess I've had a glut of cat posts this week... well, before that it was a long dry spell with no cat posts, so we'll just think of it as making up for lost time. I read some article about how to be a popular blogger that said, "DO NOT BLOG ABOUT YOUR CAT." But it contradicted itself elsewhere in the article, so I took it with a grain of salt, because an English major would not do that. And English majors like cats. Because they are writers. And writers are cat people. Hemingway had many-toed cats. And I have a many-toed cat! Alas, that does not make me Hemingway.)

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Tags: thursday thirteen, tnr, cats, pet rescue