Cheap Shot in the War on Cats

The city of Niagara Falls, NY has a population of about 50,000 and contains approximately 14 square miles of land area.  Sauntering around those 14 square miles are more than 60,000 stray and feral cats – so says the SPCA of Niagara Co.  That works out to about 4286 cats per square mile of land in the city.  Another way to look at it:  One square mile equals 640 acres.  Assuming an even distribution of cats, that would be roughly 7 cats on every acre of land.  Since we know that cats would obviously not distribute themselves evenly, it’s reasonable to assume there are many acres with less than 7 cats and many with more than 7 cats.  But no matter how you toss the dice, the claim amounts to a terrible awful lot of cats.

But wait, there’s more:

“As long as they’re not spayed or neutered those numbers are just going to keep increasing,” said Amy Lewis, executive director [of the SPCA of Niagara Co].

The Coming Menace.  Of Cats.

Alex Matthews sees the cats all the time roaming in his neighborhood[.]

Yes I would guess so.  I imagine he sees them as he’s wading through them and tripping over them.  He sees them perched on every tree branch, front porch and car hood.  He sees them in his cat hating nightmares:

He says people are feeding them and they keep coming back for more. However he has another concern. “With so much rabies and I got young kids that are curious, they’ll go out and touch the cats and kittens and I don’t want them to get sick.” he said.

There have been four animals who tested positive for rabies in Niagara Co from January through July 2015.  At least one of those four was a raccoon.  I don’t know what type of animals the other 3 were or if they were outside the city of Niagara Falls (since the data is reported by county, not by city).  At any rate, it hardly seems as if there is “so much rabies” within the Coming Menace cat population of Niagara Falls.

But the SPCA of Niagara Co appears to be fanning the flames of cat hatery.  I wonder why:

Lewis told 2 On Your Side the main reason for the cat explosion is because “there’s a lot of people don’t spay and neuter, there’s not low cost accessible spay-neuter programs for them. We do have one at the shelter, but we don’t have the resources to accommodate large numbers of animals.”
The Niagara SPCA [needs] a new in-house surgical suite to do more.
The Board is in the very beginning stages of planning either a large expansion at the current facility or building a new facility. The cost could be as high as $8 million.

Ah, I see.  They need $8 million.  Or maybe sixty-thousandy-million.  Or maybe, like the Phantom Menace community’s cats, “those numbers are just going to keep increasing.”  But instead of educating the public about humanely reducing the community cat population over time while protecting public health via rabies vaccination and asking for donations to help in that endeavor, the SPCA seems to have gone the blame-the-public route while throwing cats under the bus.  I mean, the cats who weren’t already under buses in the city, which would have to be quite a lot.  Because so many.

(Thanks Clarice for the link.)