For nearly two weeks, the world followed the plight of Molly, the cat who was trapped inside the walls of a Greenwich Village delicatessen. Crews worked for days to free the little black cat. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief when they finally pulled her from the hole that they had drilled through three layers of bricks.
It’s great news that Molly has been rescued. Those who helped to free her are heroes indeed. But at this very moment, millions of other cats are struggling in life-or-death situations—and they rarely make front-page news. Locked behind bars at animal shelters or fighting for their lives on the streets, countless cats suffer and die every day because there simply aren’t enough good homes for them. Just one cat and her kittens can create 420,000 more kittens over the course of seven years. Spaying and neutering and adopting from shelters, instead of buying from pet stores or breeders, save thousands of cats from untold suffering.
Unlike Molly, many cats in animal shelters don’t get to have a life with a happy ending. Half of the 6 to 8 million animals who enter U.S. shelters each year don’t make it out alive. They spend days or weeks in small cages in a room full of strange smells and sounds and other frightened felines. Dozens more like them come in each day. If no one comes to claim or adopt them, their lives are ended with a “Good girl” and a needle in their vein—if they are lucky. At some animal shelters, cats are shot, gassed in metal boxes crammed full of other cats, or injected with a paralytic agent that slowly suffocates them while they’re still awake.
Some so-called “no-kill” shelters keep unwanted cats in cages for their entire lives. No one feeds them “special treats” or calls in an animal therapist to soothe them, as rescuers did for Molly. They are lucky if someone lets them out of their cages for a few minutes per week to stretch their legs. When these animal shelters fill up, they often turn away needy animals, leaving them at the mercy of people who don’t want them. Last June, a Pennsylvania man threw his dog out of his truck and ran over him after the “no-kill” shelter where he tried to surrender the dog told him to make an appointment and come back later.
On the streets outside the deli where Molly was trapped—and on the streets of virtually every city and small town in America—cats who are left to fend for themselves starve, freeze, get hit by cars, ingest poison, are abused by cruel people, and contract diseases like feline leukemia, feline AIDS, and rabies. Even if they are rescued, many cats are so feral that they can’t be socialized to live with humans. So they are either euthanized or sent back to the streets to finish out their hard, short lives.
Rescuing cats and dogs from these terrible situations may not be as dramatic as drilling through brick and mortar, but for the millions of homeless and unwanted animals, it is every bit as critical. Everyone reading this can help make a difference by spaying and neutering their own companion dogs and cats, boycotting pet shops that sell animals, and never, ever abandoning animals on the streets to “fend for themselves.”
Lindsay Pollard-Post is a staff writer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; HelpingAnimals.com.
