Pray tell, what wrong have they done?

I received an email from a lady who asked for help in caring for (with the hope of getting adopted) a small kitten that she has been looking after.

She tells me that in the past, she has rescued and surrendered a mother-cat with her kittens to a shelter, paid a donation, only to discover after one week that the entire family had been euthanised. She wonders if the donation had been used for euthanasia, and if so, isn’t that a terrible thing to do?

This is not the first time I am hearing this kind of story. There has been far too many of such cases. If only you knew how many animals are euthanised each week by the authorities and the shelters, you would be horrified, especially when many of these animals are perfectly healthy.

Those of us who do not think it is right must speak up and be heard. And we must do our part, no matter how small, to start a change.

If everybody just sits back and sighs, “what to do?”, nothing will happen. After fifty years, nothing would have changed at all.

For people who think euthanasia is justified, I’d like them to consider the following (sorry for repeating myself, but I have to, especially to people who say, “what to do? there’s no other way.”)

1. If an orphanage or old folks home is overcrowded and there is a new orphan or old person coming in, do you euthanise the existing inmates to make room for the new person?

2. If there are too many beggars or homeless people living on the street, do you capture them with a net and kill them (by shooting, strangling, burying alive, drowning, burning or lethal injection) in order to control their population?

I will repeat myself here, and I will repeat again and again, if I have to:

If it is not right for humans, it should not be right for animals.

Please put ourselves in their place, and feel their pain and their fear, and their desire to live.

What wrong have these animals done to deserve such cruelty?

How did they come to live with us in the first place?

Was it their choice?

No, it wasn’t. It was our forefathers and ancestors who needed companionship and hence domesticated the wild dogs, wolves and wild cats. Our forefathers said to them, “Come, live with us, and let us look after each other for life.”

The animals remembered this covenant. The humans forgot somewhere along the line.

And the animals continued living with us, and living by the laws of nature, they multiply. That’s the way they live. We cannot expect them to practise birth control.

That is how the stray animal population came about. Was it their fault that they have come to live amongst us? They would probably have remained in the jungle had our forefathers not domesticated them.

And now, humans find them a pest and resort to the easiest way out to exterminate them – kill them. Or, some humans think throwing them back into the jungle will solve the problem, but these humans do not realise that the animals do not have the instinct to survive in the wild anymore.

Is this the way so-called civilised (and intelligent) humans solve problems?

Why are we so intolerant of the stray cat coming to our garden to poo? Or the stray dog pee-ing on our car tyres? Why are we so intolerant of their barking or mewing? Why are we so intolerant of their mere presence and existence that we must lodge a complaint knowing fully well that the authorities would capture them and have them killed?

Why can’t we be more tolerant and accepting, just as we accept our bosses or relatives who sometimes, are more annoying and troublesome than stray dogs and cats?

Let us not adopt the “what to do?” mentality. Do something, if you know it is not right. When I tell people about what AnimalCare does, that we are promoting CNRM to control the stray population as a long-term solution, they scoff and say, “How much can you do? There are so many strays.”

Yes, there are so many strays, and if all of us sit back and do nothing about it, there will be more strays in time to come. And the authorities will just continue killing them, but nothing will change. Research has shown that killing is not effective in controlling the stray population.

Please remove killing as an option. Whether it is called euthanasia, whether it is done by lethal injection or strangling, it is still killing.

Spaying and neutering IS the long-term solution to this problem. It may take 50 years or even 200 years before we see any significant difference, but we have to make a start somewhere.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing (attributed to Edmund Burke).

Let’s do something, please.