How to Kill Cats Humanely or Not

In an early post I explained with a heavy heart and an angry brain how to kill cats humanely or not. Please read it here if you like: Euthanize a cat. It is interesting and disturbing. In that post I said that PETA considered that euthanasia by carbon dioxide poisoning to be cruel as the cat struggles for air and screams. The point of this post is this. When a cat shelter uses the carbon dioxide method of killing cats it is easier for the people doing the killing and harder for the cat.

This is because the cat is put into a chamber and the person in charge leaves the room. When it is all over they come back and do what they do with a dead cat - what do they do with dead cats? It is said some go into cat food.....!

OK the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) animal shelters in Nova Scotia have been directed to use lethal injections as it has been decided that it is more humane, which it clearly is. Well done. But this new procedure is proving hard to do by the volunteers and staff of the shelters because the cat has to be held by the person when the injection is being delivered. There is an interesting natural balance here in terms of pain. For the cat there is less pain and for the people there is more pain. This may lead to less killing of cats in shelters, in fact. Cape Breton SPCA killed more than 1,000 cats in 2008.

It also brings to mind one of the root causes of the gradual eradication in the wild of wildcats. For 99.99% of the world's population the beautiful wildcats are out of sight and out of mind. We don't see the deaths of tigers by poisoning. We don't see a leopard being beaten to death by irate villagers who are forced to live in close proximity to leopards and tigers. If we did perhaps something better would be done about it.



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