Neutering

WHY ‘NEUTER YOUR ‘TOM’ CAT?

A ‘tom’ cat can mate with over 40 female cats a year and he can and will follow the scent of a female over 7 miles away! While he’s out and about roaming the area he can easily get lost and find himself homeless when the romancing is over. Unless his owner has micro-chipped him and is lucky to have him found by a cat lover, Tom is doomed to live a life of misery. Nobody will adopt an entire tomcat, or even tolerate him in the back garden, because he fights other people’s pets, male and female, and marks houses and gardens with a pungent scent.

Homeless and hungry, he will enter houses through the cat flap in search of food, only to get shooed away. Fighting for his survival, he will soon look run-down and battered and his chances of finding a new home dwindle even further. “Mangy toms” are usually not mangy at all, they are often only neglected, undernourished and battle scarred. Toms are the most frequent victims of road death. The newest threat of all now is a virus, the killer FIV (Feline Immunodeficiency Virus), which is passed on during fights through biting when the saliva of the infected cat enters the bloodstream of the other. No cat has been known to recover from it and entire tomcats are most likely to fall victim. All this could be avoided by neutering.

And what about “the girls”?

Did you know that one unspayed female cat could be responsible for 10,924 kittens over a 6 year period?
This is a minimum total calculated by assuming she has her first litter when she is a year old, (although this could be as young as six months) and using the low rate of only 2 litters a year per mature female cat (most cats have 3 or 4 litters per year), basing our calculation on 4 kittens each time, 2 male and 2 female, and not taking the death rate into account.

So neutering your female kitten before she is six months old could prevent a minimum of 10,924 unwanted cats looking for new homes and would most likely extend your cats life by excluding the many risks involved in having kittens. It is an old wives tale when people say that cats should be allowed to have one litter first. Why put your cat at risk?