The benefit of spaying and neutering

Jennifer Vanderau
Cumberland Valley Animal Shelter

(3/2021) I was on the phone with a volunteer whom I hadn’t spoken to in ages the other day and she came up with an idea that I had to put down on paper.

Or a word processing screen, as the case may be.

She is a cat-lover. Always has been, always will be.

She’s also been known to feed the wildlife around her house cat food sandwiches, but that’s a story for another time.

She takes amazing care of the cats that show up around her home. Her husband has even built them outside enclosures with heat and blankets and in some respects, those cats are probably warmer than I am some nights.

She’s a huge proponent for spaying and neutering and back in the day even helped take care of a cat colony near her church.

I wasn’t joking when I said she’s a cat-lover.

So she came up with the idea of being able to spay and neuter a cat by seeing him or her and zapping them with a ray or, I even said, blinking at them like Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie.

Our conversation took a bit of a crazy turn (well crazy-er) after that, but just go with me here.

What if we did have the capability of super simple, painless and free spaying and neutering for the feline world?

Studies have shown that the real way to control the pet population is to have your pets spayed and neutered. In fact, years ago, I read an article about a town in New England somewhere that passed an ordinance saying that unless your animal was used for breeding purposes, he or she had to be spayed or neutered. It was the law and you could be facing fines if you didn’t abide by it.

You know what happened? The animal shelters emptied out.

No joke. They had to call down south to see if there were any animals they could transport to their shelters.

So, spaying and neutering works.

And now is the time of year when our feline friends are climbing out of the cold and looking to spend some time with one another and, well, make babies.

There is a statistic out there that one unneutered and one unspayed cat can produce more than 10 million cats in ten years’ time. I know that’s a little unbelievable, but if allowed to continuously reproduce, our cat friends can certainly add to the population.

Let’s take a conservative estimate. Let’s say an unspayed and unneutered male cats have four litters per year and three kittens per litter. For the math majors out there, that’s 12 kittens produced in the first year.

Each of those 12 can go make 12 of their own and each of those 12 can go make 12 of their own and it begins to make pyramid schemes look pretty obsolete.

But it happens. And that’s how the cat numbers climb so very high in animal shelters.

You can see how spaying and neutering just two cats can keep a whole bunch of cats from coming into existence – and in the summer time when we have more than 200 cats in our care, that would be a welcome respite, to say the least.

Going back to my original bizarre theory, if we could spay and neuter any cat we see in the blink of an eye, the cat population would decrease.

My volunteer took it a step further and said that cats would become incredibly valuable friends because you wouldn’t be able to find a cat just anywhere.

She said, "The less we have of something, the more we seem to value it."

It’s true, sadly, but I could see it coming to fruition if we didn’t have as many cats as we do right now.

There could even be a waiting list to adopt cats. Could you even imagine it?

I know at CVAS we have a tough time picturing something like that.

In the 20 years I’ve been here, we’ve always had far more cats than we ever had dogs and it looks like that trend will continue because of the felines that aren’t spayed or neutered. There has never been a time when our cat adoption or isolation areas were empty. Ever.

If we could all just become I Dream of Jeannie, how different the cat population could be. Actually, a whole lot of things in my life would be different if I had Jeannie’s ability to blink my wishes into reality, but that’s a plot that will likely show up in a Hollywood movie, not in real life.

Until then, our feline friends will have to continue to rely on the handful of humans who understand how important that surgery is in keeping the numbers manageable.

For all of you out there working so hard to help the cats, you have my sincere gratitude, appreciation and respect.

And if you got the I Dream of Jeannie reference, let’s have coffee and talk retro television. Maybe we could even find a place that would let us bring our cats...

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Jennifer Vanderau is the Director of Communications for the Cumberland Valley Animal Shelter in Chambersburg, Pa., and can be reached at cvasoc@innernet.net. The shelter accepts both monetary and pet supply donations. For more information, call the shelter at (717) 263-5791 or visit the website www.cvas-pets.org.