How can we get ahead of 'Just One Litter?'
from No More Homeless Pets Forum
Question from Kay:
I work with two rescue groups and the majority of people who come
wanting help with fixing ferals, strays, and pets have animals who
had at least one litter already. I think the spay/neuter message has
only been partially successful. Although we are fixing more animals
than ever before, we are not getting through to the public about how
important it is to prevent that first or second litter. How do we
solve this problem to avoid being in the same situation ten years
from now?
Answer from Esther Mechler:
It does sometimes seem truly unbelievable that at the SPAY/USA toll-
free hotline -- after 11 years --we are still getting so many
calls!!! We have fielded so many tens of thousands already! How can
there be any MORE!!!??? Yet, despite the declining numbers of animals
entering shelters over the last decade, we do in fact still have
about 5 million surplus animals per year coming into this world, just
in the USA. And that is about 5 million too many. And so we still
need to reach a lot of people...
These folks could be divided into three groups:
. The indigent, who cannot afford to spay or neuter their cats and
dogs
. children, who might reach their parents and
. the veterinarians, who by doing early spay/neuter, could help
prevent litters in animals around the age of 6 months
One of the many things I learned from Kathy Savesky of the Bosack and
Kruger Foundation is the importance of segmenting your market for
your message. And one of the pieces of information we do have about
the cat/dog surplus is that a disproportionate number of breeding
animals come from poverty areas. These are the main areas we need
to target... Early on, I remember someone advising me that a good
place to put up flyers is in laundromats. Folks without washers and
dryers are likely to have less - if any - discretionary income to
spay/neuter their cats and dogs.
SPAY/USA has produced some flyers, the most popular of which are The
Kitty Pyramid and the Dog Pyramid, easily-reproducible, letter-
size "posters" which show just how fast that one litter translates
into another and then another. Over and over we have been told that
this poster seems to convince people just how important it is to take
action. To view (and print) these flyers just go to www.spayusa.org
and click on the How Can I Help? button. These "posters" can
and should be put up in grocery and "convenience" stores, pet supply
stores, libraries, community centers, social service agencies. At
the same web site you can also download "This Baby Can Have Babies of
her Own" and "Littermates Can Litter," both of which educate folks
about how important it is to spay early, a very important part of the
puzzle. The fact that folks have too often waited till too late to
spay or neuter is a good part of the problem.
Social service agencies and public health departments are excellent
places to begin positive dialogues with the people who interface with
the public and can help us get the message out; my advice would be
to get some input from the people workring in the local agencies
about how best to do it locally, as conditions vary so in our large
country. What may work in Maine, may not in Texas. Likewise Alaska
and Hawaii.
I remember years ago reading a wonderful brochure put out by the HSUS
entitled, "Just One Litter." It chronicled the difficult lives of
the 5 or 6 kittens born to an unspayed (obviously) mother cat -
including, I believe, the births some 6 months later of their own
litters. We need to produce more such literature, and also stories
in other formats, such as video news releases and public service
announcements. Local p.s.a's can be produced through A-V departments
at universities or local cable channel stations, tailor-made for the
community.
In addition to reaching adults directly, we can reach adults through
their children by providing humane education programs in the schools.
The Latham Foundation, the ASPCA, the National Association of Humane
and Environmental Education, all have excellent resources on how to
do this. SPAY/USA, with the help of the ASPCA, has produced a video
about the importance of spay/neuter that can be shown to elementary
age children. The video is 20 minutes long, comes with a teaching
guide, and is called Throwaways. It is also available in
Spanish - Rechazados.
Our other audience is the veterinarians. Are we reaching the
cats/dogs in time, before they multiply? - obviously not often
enough! And unless veterinarians are willing to do spays/neuters
before animals can multiply, we will continue to have what Dr. Marvin
Mackie calls "woops litters" If cats or dogs who are allowed
outdoors are not altered prior to the age of 6 months, there will
always be unwanted litters. I suspect that a good number of the
unwanted litters come from this set of circumstances, though I do not
have hard data for you. In any case, we need to persuade
veterinarians to move their minimum age for spays/neuters back by at
least a month - from 6 months to 5 months or earlier. You as a rescue
group person know how many animals are adopted as kittens and pups,
and unless they go to their new home spayed/neutered, there is a
chance they will multiply... We do know how to stop this -- through
strict Neuter Before Adoption policies -- but these require the
cooperation of veterinarians willing to spay or neuter at an age much
younger than what was traditionally taught in vet schools.
We have come a long way in the last ten years, and we need to keep up
the momentum - developing new materials, disseminating it in creative
new ways or else, as you say, it will be easy to slip backward and be
in a bad situation ten years from now. Thanks for a great question!
Answer from Peter Marsh:
I think you are exactly right when you say that our spay/neuter
message has been only partly successful. The research certainly bears
you out. Recent surveys have found that upwards of 85% of all
household cat litters are not planned. Fully a third of these
accidental litters are "oops" litters that could have been avoided if
the pet's caretaker realized how early cats become sexually
mature.
So we need to update our spay/neuter message to take into account
that the critical issue for many pet caretakers by now has become not
WHETHER to have their pets sterilized but WHEN. As part of the new
generation of spay/neuter programs we need to move beyond the
traditional "Prevent a Litter" spay/neuter message to incorporate
a "Prevent a First Litter" component.
Let me tell you a little about how we approached this in New
Hampshire. First we worked with local veterinarians to adopt a "B 4
5" sterilization protocol in which they counseled their clients to
have their dogs and cats sterilized no later than five months of age
(this timetable, of course, is not applicable to shelter kittens or
puppies younger than that, who should be sterilized before
placement). Adopting an idea used by the Erie County SPCA, we
encouraged veterinarians to schedule the surgery for 20 weeks at the
time they saw the kitten or puppy to administer pediatric
immunizations, so that the timing of the surgery (like the timing of
the immunizations) would become a matter of routine protocol in their
clinic.
We also need to update our message to explain why the timing of the
surgery is so important. We need to explain the WHY of WHEN. In our
experience, the most effective way to do that is to go beyond the
traditional anti-overpopulation message to emphasize that delaying
thesurgery will jeopardize the animal's health unnecessarily. For
instance, mammary tumors are the most common type of tumors in female
dogs and are malignant almost 50% of the time. As spay/neuter
activists, we are not doing our job unless we get the message to
caretakers that timely sterilization will reduce the risk of
developing mammary tumors to almost nil, but that the risk increases
dramatically if the dog is allowed to experience heat cycles, even if
she does not become pregnant.
The same health-protective spay/neuter message must be gotten to cat
caretakers. For cats, mammary tumors are malignant more than 80% of
the time and result in high morbidity rates. While timely neutering
does not eliminate the risk for a feline of developing this type of
tumor, it reduces it by 80%, which should be enough to seal the deal
for most caretakers.
As you suggest, the key is to update our spay/neuter message so that
we will avoid being in the same situation ten years from now. An
effective "Kittens Have Kittens" or "Prevent A First Litter" campaign
should help us do that.
Best of luck with your efforts. Let me know if I can be of any
assistance.
http://www.bestfriends.org/archives/forums/112904spay.html
Posted on SHARE Yahoo group Nov. 30, 2004