October 12, 2006
420,000 cats not!
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Have you ever heard or read that one intact female cat can produce 420,000 offspring? Leave it to Gina to not only question this number, but put the Wall Street Journal's number guy on the task of coming up with a more realistic figure.
It is a very interesting read even if you are not a numbers person. The Humane Society has since taken this number off their web site, and replaced it with more likely statistics.
Check out this snipet.
"To get to 420,000 would require two litters a year from each cat, every year, and that 1.4 kittens survive each litter to live healthy (and productive) lives. (Dog owners, take note: A similar calculation for canines finds one female dog could, theoretically, produce 67,000 dogs in six years; this stat is also popular among animal advocates.)
The earliest reference I could find to the cat-reproduction figure was a 1988 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (citing the Humane Society). If you take a mythical cat beginning in that year, and let her and her offspring reproduce at the theoretical rate over the 18 years since, you'd have a cat population of nearly 50 trillion. That would mean the U.S. produces far more cats than coal: If each cat weighed, on average, five pounds, this catastrophically huge feline colony would weigh 120 billion tons -- or about 100 times the amount of coal produced in the U.S. last year.
Click here to fetch the rest.
Just becuse the numbers didn't add up, does not make the homeless pet situation any less serious.
Our Maine shelters are over run with cats!
Spay and neuter your pets!!!
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When my two brother cats were born in 1990, their Mom had 7 kittens in that litter. She had previously had two other litters of 6 and 5 kittens respectively. I am not sure over the subsequent years how many litters she may have had, or what the numbers were unique to each litter. However, for sake of exaggeration, if her life cycle had lasted another 16 years with an average litter of 7 kittens, that would have been 112 cats.
Thanks,
Bill
Posted by
BHOctober 12, 2006 07:06 AM
Hi Bill,
And so and so on and so on. Makes me think 100 is a low number.
nancy
Posted by
nancyOctober 12, 2006 07:31 AM
Does it really matter the exact numbers? The only reason a number was written was to draw attention to the number of unwanted cats in the country and any large number might do that. More attention needs to be paid to spay and neuter (a point made by Nancy in this blog) and keeping people from thinking they can allow "just one litter". I agree with HSUS, we don't need to breed any animal until the shelters full of unwanted animals are empty!!
Friends don't let friends keep intact pets!!!!
Posted by
BettiOctober 12, 2006 07:40 AM
In response to Bill with his figure of a 116 cats, he is forgetting that those kittens will also produce and their kittens, so within a very short time you have large numbers of cats even when lots of them don't make it to adulthood. Having trapped feral cat colonies for years I know how the numbers can multiply in just a few years.
Always spay or neuter no matter how cute your cat happens to be.
Spay don't litter!
Gina (not the one in the article)
Posted by
G GutmanOctober 12, 2006 08:34 AM
No matter how you slice it, the numbers are overwhelming. The Animal Refuge League in Westbrook has been spaying and neuteing all cats for 10+ years and running a spay/neuter assistance program for the same time period. We have yet to see a decline in the numbers of cats flooding our shelter. Our spay/neuter coordinator is happy to talk to those who need help getting their pets altered and provide them with resources to our propgram or others. Please also ask about our STOP program. If an entire litter of kittens, puppies or rabbits comes to the shelter to be altered and placed for adoption, we will spay the mother at no cost and return her to her family. If many people do one small part the efforts can be dramatic.
Susan Britt, Director of Operations, Animal Refuge League.
Posted by
Susan BrittOctober 12, 2006 09:13 AM
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