| Animal Overpopulation
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Other Animal Welfare Issues
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Why You Can’t Find A Good Home For Every One
Do you believe you aren’t adding to the pet overpopulation problem if you find good homes for all your pet’s puppies or kittens? Then consider this:
Finding a Home
Suppose there are ten families in your community who want puppies and can provide good homes for them, but there are 15 puppies who need good homes. When
each of the ten families takes a puppy, there will be five "leftover" puppies who have no future except humane euthanasia.
Then suppose you let your dog have a litter of five puppies.
Puppies having Puppies
There are now 20 puppies in the community who need good homes…but still only ten good homes available. Even if you manage to place every one of your five
puppies with one of the ten available homes, there are now ten leftover puppies where before there were only five. You’ve created more animals, but you haven’t
created more homes—just taken some homes away from other puppies and kittens, dogs and cats. By allowing your pet to breed, you’ve increased the number of
puppies who will have to be euthanized because no one wants them.
Ending the Cycle
Until breeding is limited to the point where there are more than enough good homes available for all the puppies and kittens being born in your community, you can’t
find a good home for every one.
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Puppy Overpopulation
Large Litters!
When people have babies, they usually have only one baby at a time. When dogs and cats have babies, they usually have more than one at a time!
It Adds Up!
By the age of five years, a female dog and her female offspring can produce 192 puppies (assuming two females per litter and two litters per year). Arid this doesn’t
include all of the offspring produced by her male puppies.
A Home for Everyone?
Humans simply do not produce at these outrageous rates. Nor does every human born want a puppy. This adds up to a great deal of unwanted puppies and dogs in
our community. Please help us end this tragic overpopulation problem by spaying or neutering your dogs.
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How Do You Produce 80 Million Cats?
It’s simple. Just allow two cats and their surviving offspring to breed for ten years. In that time, you’ll have produced 80,399,780 cats (this assumes two litters per year
and 2.8 surviving kittens per litter).
First year: 12
Second year: 66
Third year: 382
Fourth year: 2,201
Fifth year: 12,680
Sixth year: 73,041
Seventh year: 420,715
Eighth year: 2,423,316
Ninth year: 13,968,290
Tenth year: 80,399,780
Humans simply do not produce at these outrageous rates. Nor does every human born want a kitten. And since every cat needs a human (that’s what
domestic means), this adds up to a great deal of unwanted kittens and cats in our community.
Please help us end this tragic overpopulation problem by spaying or neutering your cats.
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Is Your Cat a Floosie?
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Do you "let the cat out?"
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Does she occasionally get overly affectionate and roll about seductively?
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Does she hang-out with an undesirable lot of feisty aggressive Toms who yowl
and hiss and fight through the wee hours?
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Does she disappear for long periods and come back with a suspicious smirk on her face?
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Is she spayed?
Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes? And No?
Then you are the owner of a feline floosie. A dubious distinction indeed, for her. And for you.
Why? Because cats breed like rabbits. An uncontrolled mating pair will beget 12 cats in a year, which will beget 66 cats in
two years, thus begetting 382 cats in three
years, thence 2,000 cats in four years, 73,000 in seven years, and thereby begetting—gasp—80 million cats in only ten years.
Result? Inevitable suffering for millions of our friendly, fluffy, friends. Homelessness. Starvation. Disease. And death from cars, larger animals, pranksters, and more.
You can help stop these generations of suffering. Have your female spayed. Your male neutered. Don’t allow litters.
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The Lack of Compassion in Fashion
There is not any humane way to make a fur coat. Here are just a few facts you may not know about how those beautiful coats are made
How Do They Get that Beautiful Fur?
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Animal Farms
The most common and gruesome form of killing is by electrocution. An electrical cable is clamped onto the animal’s mouth and another inserted into the rectum. The animal screams and suffers extreme pain during this process.
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Wild Animals
Most trapped animals are caught in the steel-jaw leg hold trap—a device so inhumane that it has been banned in 65 countries—but not in the US. An animal caught in one of these traps is said to experience pain comparable to a human getting his hand slammed in a car door—and then not being able to remove it. If the animal does not immediately die, then she could succumb to starvation, dehydration, freezing temperatures, or predator attacks. If the animal is still alive, trappers kill them in any number of ways, including a blow to the chest (to suffocate the creature or crush his heart), drowning, or
hitting them in the head with a blunt instrument.
The Laws
In fact, just like trapping, there are no laws regulating how animals may be killed, so anything goes.
Help Stop the Suffering
Ask your friends and family not to buy furs or any product with fur-lining. Let others know that wearing clothing made from so much suffering is not fashionable. If there
is not a market for fur coats, these animals will no longer be trapped or raised for their fur.
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Dissection In The Classroom
Most of us probably recall being asked to dissect frogs, worms, turtles, pigs, cats, mice, and other animals in school. If we refused, it often meant a failing or lower grade in the class.
Today’s Classroom
Even though our views on animals have changed for the better over the last 30 years, many school systems still advocate this archaic practice as a necessary
element of a child’s education. Dissection not only teaches children the anatomy of a single species, but it also teaches them it is all right to disregard another’s life for the sake of learning.
Speaking Out
Fortunately, concerned students, parents, and teachers are speaking out against dissection and asking for educational alternatives to this unnecessary killing and casual use of millions of animals. As a result, some states have already passed laws giving students the legal right to choose an alternative form of study. And students who choose high tech alternatives, such as computer models, actually score better on tests than students who dissect animals.
What You Can Do
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Write a letter to the editor of your newspaper.
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Talk to teachers and principals about alternatives.
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Present your viewpoint at the next school board meeting. Encourage students to speak out against dissection and seek out alternatives.
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Ask your state representatives to propose legislation that would give students the right to choose alternative methods.
You can make a difference!
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Ten Ways To Help Us Help The Animals
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Schedule a speaker from a shelter to talk to your clubs, lunch forums, neighborhood groups, religious gatherings,
and scout groups
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Place donation canisters wherever you do business (or pleasure), such as your office, grocery store, dry cleaners, bar, restaurant, and gym
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Volunteer time to walk the dogs, play with the cats, man an exhibit, bathe puppies, spearhead a special event or serve in any of your local shelter volunteer programs
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Coordinate fundraising projects, like bake sales, happy hours, or fashion shows
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Post fliers about shelter services or events at your apartment complex, office, or club
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Offer to drive your neighbor’s unspayed pet to a low-cost clinic (we’ll help you find one)
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If your company, church, school, sorority, fraternity or club donates to charities, add us to their receiving list
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Donate money (always extremely useful)
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If your company matches employee donations to charities, make sure we’re on their list
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Find out if your local shelter could use any of the services or products your company produces
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Humane Society or Animal Control: What’s the Difference?
In the beginning, humane societies (also called animal rescue leagues, SPCAs, etc.) were created by concerned individuals to protect animals from people. Animal
control agencies, on the other hand, were created by governments to protect people from animals.
Funding
Their source of funding matches their purposes: animal control agencies are funded by the local government (city or county) they serve; humane societies survive on
donations from individuals and businesses in their community. These nonprofit agencies are not chapters of any national group, but are private organizations
governed by a volunteer board of directors made up of people from the community.
Working Together
Both of these types of agencies work for the welfare and humane treatment of animals, and they often have similar programs; adoptions, euthanasia services, cruelty
investigations, and animal rescue. Animal control agencies, however, are generally responsible for picking up strays and enforcing local animal codes (leash laws,
vicious dog laws, pet licensing, etc.). Some humane societies contract with their local governments to take on this civic responsibility.
Humane societies, and some animal control agencies, tend to have services that reach out to area pet owners (and potential pet owners), such as visiting
classrooms, holding summer day camps for kids, offering pet behavior classes, visiting nursing homes and hospitals with pets, and running spay/neuter low cost
clinics.
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The Backyard Dog
You see one in every community, a dog tied day after day to a back porch or fence, lying lonely on a pad of bare, packed dirt.
Dying for Attention
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Dogs are instinctually pack animals.
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Forcing a dog to live away from her human goes against the dog’s most basic instinct.
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If you doubt this, think of all the whining, barking, clawing dogs you have seen tied alone outside.
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Abandoned, but chained up, backyard dogs cannot move to comfort, shelter, or companionship.
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Most often their water and food bowls are empty.
Dogs can offer people the gifts of steadfast devotion, abiding love and joyful companionship. Unless people accept these offerings and take the time to return them in
kind, it would be best for you not to get a dog. A sad, lonely, bewildered dog tied out back only suffers, and what sort of person wants to maintain suffering?
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