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At the pound: Sterilization, a few days of hope and then the needle
 [Times photo: Lisa DeJong] |
Cats lay on a table at Pinellas County Animal Services after being spayed or neutered. While the cats are still anesthetized, Shannon Ramsey cleans dirt and mites from their eats, clips their claws, tests their blood and vaccinates them. By STEPHEN NOHLGREN © St. Petersburg Times, published July 10, 2000 LARGO -- With hunger and disease, life in the wild is tough on cats. Survival of the species depends on prolific breeding, a feline specialty.
Go ahead, say it: "We gotta find those two cats and stop them!" The people at Pinellas County Animal Services aren't laughing. They have the unenviable task of keeping a lid on our stray cat population. While cat fanciers pampered their purebreds over the weekend at St. Petersburg's Coliseum, the animal control folks inherited dozens more strays.
Animal services workers will tend to them as best they can, bestowing snippets of affection when the moment permits. They will clean them up, inject them with life-saving medicine, spay and neuter them, and hope that someone will stop by and take them home. But for all their efforts, they know the odds aren't good. Animal services doesn't keep exact numbers, but staffers say about 18,000 animals funneled through the county's shelter last year, about two-thirds of them cats. They were rounded up by animal control, dropped off by owners who no longer wanted them, brought in by good-hearted residents who found them on the streets. Something like 200 to 300 cats were reclaimed by owners who had lost them. About 2,000 were adopted. The rest -- roughly 10,000 cats -- were euthanized, victims of their own inexorable numbers. The shelter has space for 250 to 300 cats. Kitty season -- roughly April through October -- can produce 100 new arrivals a day. "Cats have a very short shelf-life," says Dr. Welch Agnew, assistant director. Among other problems, respiratory illness spreads easily among cats confined in close quarters. Unhealthy cats put the healthy ones at risk. "The unfortunate matter about this whole business is that we can't save everything. You do what you can physically do without endangering the health of the others." Newborns and tiny kittens are a particular problem. The law requires that they be sterilized before adoption, but they must be at least eight weeks old for that. The shelter doesn't have enough time and space to let them mature. The staff tries to "foster" as many as possible -- taking them home and raising them until they are old enough for adoption. But the numbers this time of year are overwhelming. Private shelter groups like the Friends of Strays, SPCA and Humane Society won't euthanize animals when they run out of space. That pleases big-money donors, endears them to the animal-loving public and makes their work emotionally easier. But during kitty season those shelters tend to fill up and turn away people with cats on their hands. That raises the pressure on taxpayer-supported Animal Services, which is required by law to accept all animals. Stray dogs fare much better. For starters, there are fewer -- about half as many as cats. Whereas cats are often wild or semi-wild, stray dogs are often recent runaways. Almost a third get reclaimed by their owners. Dogs also can stay healthy for months in the shelter, which increases the odds that somebody will fall in love with them. They can be big or small, young or old, ugly or handsome, and someone usually will adopt them. For cats, no matter how adorable, the clock starts ticking the moment they arrive. Their first stop is a holding area -- a way-station that gives owners a chance to reclaim lost pets. Cats are kept in group pens, up to 10 to a cage, with shelves to lie on and open-air screens to climb on. Pregnant or nursing mothers are kept in individual cages, as are sick cats and cats that have bitten or scratched someone. "Adoptable" kittens, 2- to 4-pounders, have their own group dormitory. Cats with licenses or imbedded identity chips stay in holding for 10 days while animal services tries to contact their owners by phone and certified letter. Cats with no identifiers get five days in holding. Kittens, who almost never get reclaimed by owners, stay two days. Then healthy cats and kittens with good dispositions move to the operating area for the daily pre-adoption assembly line. Recently, Agnew and technicians Shannon Ramsey and Pam Gilkey processed dozens of cats and a few dogs for four hours. A shot of anesthesia puts each cat or kitten to sleep, leaving them limp and malleable as rag dolls. Ramsey and Gilkey shave the animals' bellies and genital areas, swab them with antiseptic, then splay them out on one of three steel operating tables. Kitchen towels decorated with tiny flowers and ducks provide a buffer between the cold table and the warm cat bodies. A rope stretches from each paw to a clamp under the table, holding the animal steady. Brilliant round lights hang from the ceiling and illuminate every speck of their undersides. Agnew, wearing a pink surgical gown, white mask and Tweety Bird cap, unravels a pack of sterile surgical instruments, slices each cat open, removes its reproductive organs and sews it back up. Females take about 10 minutes; males a minute. Afterward, Ramsey and Gilkey clip the cats' nails, swab dirt and mites out of their ears, give them a flea treatment, shots for rabies, heartworm and other disease and draw their blood to test for feline AIDS and leukemia. Then, as space allows, the spruced up, newly sterile cats move on to the adoption area. Whoever designed this 5-year-old building was thinking well. A glassed-in case the size of an elevator juts into the main lobby. Inside, adoptable kittens climb on a staircase, play king-of-the-hill on scratch posts, chase their tails and snooze together in big, furry heaps. The display case is a magnet for every kid who walks through the door and it leads to more cages where kittens and cats are ready for adoption. Gabrielle Connor, 7, of St. Petersburg, is sampling the wares. She saved enough to buy a Nintendo Game Boy but decided to get a kitten instead. She bounces from one kitten to another, pronouncing most of them "s-o-o-o-o-o cute.' Joan Du Shane, a friend of Gabrielle's mother, made the mistake of bringing along her daughter, April, to watch the selection. They already have dogs at home. But now April has a black and white kitten firmly in her single-minded grasp. "Pu-lease, Mom, can't we have a kitten? Pu-lease." Du Shane finally relents, after extracting a promise that April will care for the kitten and do chores to pay for it.
Both girls are delighted until their mothers start filling out the paperwork and are thwarted by an Animal Services rule. Anyone who rents an apartment or house must produce a letter from the landlord agreeing to the adoption. All too often, animals have been turned loose when landlords discover pets on the premises. You can't just lie. Animal Services has a computer that can determine home ownership on the spot. Gabrielle and April will have to come back with a letter. Adoption coordinator Gary Miller is also disappointed. He wants to move those cats. Animal Services charges $30 for an adoption, which covers the sterilization, shots and tags. If a cat lingers two days in the adoption area, Miller cuts the price in half. Three days, and it's free. For a pet store, such price-slashing would be entrepreneurial suicide. But Miller knows first-hand what happens when his inventory stacks up. "We take care of these animals. We see them every day. We feed them and water them, then we have to take them in and assist with "the process,' " Miller says. "It's very upsetting." Besides adoptions, Animal Services is also Lost Cat Central. Fourth of July fireworks spooked a lot dogs and cats. Worried owners troop through to inspect the animals in holding pens. Lost dogs get hungry and will approach strangers, who tend to bring them in, Miller said. Dogs often show up at the shelter within 48 hours. Cats are different. Inside cats, outside cats, it doesn't matter. Once lost, they tend to hide from people, even their owners. They will cower in bushes and hide in neighbors' garages. If they stay out very long, they may hook up with wild cat colonies. Strangers are reluctant to pick up a skittish cat, so lost ones rarely turn up at the shelter quickly. It might take months, if ever. People often describe their cats and ask animal services workers to call them if it shows up. No can do, says Agnew. "They'll say it's a black and white cat. We'll see hundreds of black and white cats. Even with a picture there's no way of telling unless it's very unusual." The best thing owners can do is have their vet imbed an identifying chip in their pets' backs, he says. Every animal that comes in gets scanned for that chip. Then Animal Services will call the owner. Mike and Sue Bailey, of Palm Harbor, trek religiously to the shelter every Monday and Friday, hoping against hope that their 8-year-old grey and black tiger cat, Bashful, will show up. He's been missing since December. They've papered the neighborhood with posters and flyers. They keep running an ad in the St. Petersburg Times. They make the rounds of all the shelters and they've suffered through late-night crank calls from people pretending to have found him. "This is the craziest thing that ever happened in my life. It's like we lost a child," Mike Bailey says. "Because we don't know if he's dead or alive, we just keep looking." They think about giving up, but then they'll hear a story about someone's lost cat that showed up at home after six months. They're old shelter hands now. They figure Bashful would be pretty safe during the five-day holding period. But they know the odds and they don't want to let a sixth day pass without one more look-see.
Want to adopt? A number of nonprofit organizations offer cats and kittens for adoption at nominal fees. Here's a rundown: Pinellas County
Hillsborough County
Pasco County
Citrus County
Hernando County
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