A little something for all You CAT Haters...

Quote from: daroadie on 09 04, 10, 02:07:20:PM

Belgium: Neutering Is Compulsory
Guardian...
"Cat culls have a long history in Belgium. In Ypres, in western Flanders, they've been hurling the animals from the belfry of the 12th-century Cloth Hall for hundreds of years in an annual ritual to ward off the devil... Now with an explosion in cat copulation, the result is the Multi-Annual Cat Plan 2011-2016, which says sterilisation is necessary to relieve shelters."

"Belgium plans to neuter most cats as feline population explodes. Almost all Belgian cat owners will be obliged to have their pets sterilised and registered by 2016

The Belgian government has come up with a radical way to deal with the burgeoning cat population – to sterilise all but a select few of the animals within five years.

The feline population in Belgium, a country of 11 million people, has increased to an estimated 1.7 million, and the culling of cats has become a daily routine. According to the health ministry, more than 13,000 were killed in animal refuges last year, more than one in three of the country's 37,000 strays...

The Multi-annual Cat Plan 2011-2016, which says sterilisation is necessary 'to halt the increase in the numbers of strays and cats collected in shelters.'

Initially, all cats in shelters will be sterilised. The next phase imposes neutering on cats from breeders and sellers. Finally, all cat owners will be obliged to have their pets sterilised and registered, costing about €130 (£108) for a female cat and €50 for a tom. Breeders and owners of Siamese, Abyssinian and other special pedigrees will be exempted from the new regime.

...the animal welfare lobby is strongly supportive of the scheme.

'We don't want the cat to vanish from the earth,' said Ann De Greef, director of Gaia, which is taking the campaign to the town squares of Belgium and reports 'enormous support, but a cat can have one pregnancy every six months and 36 offspring in less than 16 months,' said De Greef.

The new project is the first to propose compulsory sterilisation nationally. It will be watched closely in other countries wrestling with ballooning cat populations."

All I can say is that it's a lot more humane than the "Cat culls" which "have a long history in Belgium. In Ypres, in western Flanders, they've been hurling the animals from the belfry of the 12th-century Cloth Hall for hundreds of years in an annual ritual to ward off the devil."

And glad to hear that even though "the massacre continues, now every three years" that "nowadays the cats are fluffy, velveteen toys. The cat cull is considered a tourist attraction, an excuse for a fancy-dress party."

A couple of people in here were all upset by a puppy cull in Bosnia the other day. I don't like the idea of culling animals, and have read that puppy culls are usually done by drowning the pups in a bucket of water.

The girl in the video had the bucket of pups -- which maybe she had been tasked by a parent or employer to cull, but instead of drowning them in a bucket she was throwing them into a stream... which, strange as it seems, maybe she thought it would give them more of a fighting chance than to make sure they drowned in the bucket or that she wouldn't have to see them drown and was more or less leaving it up to Nature and God or the Fates and letting the water carry them away...