The Importance of Fixing Your Cat

The Importance of Fixing Your Cat

Fixing your cat is crucial to a healthy future for cats in Canada. We have somewhere between 1.4 and 4.2 million feral and stray cats, and they often live short and brutal lives. Additionally, Humane Canada research indicates that more than 260,000 cats in shelters did not find homes in 2016. We all have a role to play in ending that misery, and we need to ensure our own pets can’t contribute to it.

Roughly 80% of Canada’s 9.3 million pet cats are spayed or neutered*, and that means there are up to 1.8 million pet cats that are not.

Fixing our pets prevents them from reproducing, adding to the cat overpopulation problem, and keeping our pets from roaming unsupervised helps to prevent them getting lost and adding to the population of stray or shelter cats.

Fixing female cats also eliminates the yowling associated with going into heat — which can happen as early as 5 months of age — and prevents certain cancers. Fixed males are less likely to roam far from home, and less likely to engage in territorial behaviours such as spraying and fighting.

Many cat owners think it’s okay to let their cat breed because they can find homes for their cat’s kittens. But for every kitten that does find a home, a cat that could have been adopted from a shelter remains homeless. Click here for the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies website about the importance of fixing your pet.

* “The Business of Urban Animals” by Terry Perrin, Canadian Veterinary Journal. 2009 Jan; 50(1): 48-52.