Arc
04-27-2007, 11:39 AM
Here is just a short story with some accompanying photos about why people should neuter their pets.
The kitten in the photo has many of the colors and markings or patterns that my cat Rocky AKA Rocket has—and so when Rocket was a youngster he looked a lot like this guy.
In the iconography of cuteness, few things hold greater heart-melting sway than kittens.
Hallmark, the world's largest greeting card company, owns 1,230 images of kittens and has put at least some of them on 894 products in the past decade. Corbis, a leading stock photography source, offers more than 1,400 images of kittens online for licensing. And ratemykitten.com proclaims it has posted 117,179 photos of people's kittens.
But in the real world of urban Los Angeles, where the biology of cats, the human acceptance of outdoor felines and the shortage of surrogate cat mothers all intersect, the story is not so cute. In the 12 months ending March 31, city shelters put to death 5,622 unweaned kittens.
Los Angeles County, which takes in far more animals than the city, has its own grim statistics.
The county's Department of Animal Care & Control killed 7,994 unweaned kittens in the fiscal year that ran from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006.
Here is the rest of the article.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kittens26apr26,1,7007828.story
The kitten in the photo has many of the colors and markings or patterns that my cat Rocky AKA Rocket has—and so when Rocket was a youngster he looked a lot like this guy.
In the iconography of cuteness, few things hold greater heart-melting sway than kittens.
Hallmark, the world's largest greeting card company, owns 1,230 images of kittens and has put at least some of them on 894 products in the past decade. Corbis, a leading stock photography source, offers more than 1,400 images of kittens online for licensing. And ratemykitten.com proclaims it has posted 117,179 photos of people's kittens.
But in the real world of urban Los Angeles, where the biology of cats, the human acceptance of outdoor felines and the shortage of surrogate cat mothers all intersect, the story is not so cute. In the 12 months ending March 31, city shelters put to death 5,622 unweaned kittens.
Los Angeles County, which takes in far more animals than the city, has its own grim statistics.
The county's Department of Animal Care & Control killed 7,994 unweaned kittens in the fiscal year that ran from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006.
Here is the rest of the article.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kittens26apr26,1,7007828.story