It is easy to see how it happens. You adopt a stray cat or the kitten of a friend’s cat, and before you realize it, she is pregnant. Once her kittens are born you find homes for them but if you do not fix mom quickly, you will soon have another litter to deal with. We hear this story repeatedly from caregivers applying for spay/neuter vouchers and we wish we could have helped them sooner.

But as important as cat spay/neuter is to stem the number of kittens born annually, it is even more important for individual cats. Once sterilized, they are healthier, better companions, and more likely to keep their indoor homes forever.

The large-scale push to fix cats actually did not begin from a concern over “too many cats” but from the introduction of kitty litter in the 1950’s allowing them to move indoors as “companion pets.” Families adopted kittens, but as they matured, their yowling, spraying, and kittening became more than what even the most loving caregivers could endure. So, they appealed to their vets to find a way to stop these behaviors, and the fix they came up with was sterilization.

Shelters (who account for about 45% of cat adoptions) routinely fix kittens as young as 8 weeks old before adopting them out. But the remaining 55% of pet cats (those found outdoors or passed person-to-person) are often left intact. Not because their caregivers do not understand the importance of spay/neuter, but simply because they lack the money to pay for it.

And this is where we help. We pay the cost to fix these low-income family pet cats. And by doing so, more cats will keep their indoor homes forever. This is the best outcome for everyone. The cats, their caregivers, and the communities they live in.