There’s nothing like the sunshine and warmth to brighten anyone’s day – including your cat’s. There will be paws on the door and meows around the house asking to be let out so that your furry feline can enjoy scampering in the wilderness of your garden.
In the cat rescue community, the summer months are known as kitten season. It’s not as good as it sounds.
We receive multiple litters, pregnant pusses and frustrated tom cats who have been neglected, abandoned or strayed and are now desperate for loving homes.
We may start to sound like a broken record, but we can’t emphasise enough how important it is to have your cat neutered. That’s one reason why all of our cats or neutered before rehoming, and our kittens received discounted neutering from one of our family of vets. Check out our 5 reasons why you should neuter your male cat.
1. Getting lost in lust
Nothing is sexier to a tomcat than the smell of a un-spayed lady-puss. They will travel for miles to track down an opportunity for romance. This can mean travelling outside of their territory, and getting very lost or worse, as the scent leads tomcats to cross busy roads.
2. If only he could say, not spray
Un-neutered tomcats are territorial. They want to protect their home from competing males, and keep all the cats of their dreams to themselves. Unfortunately, they like to do this with their pee and unfortunately-er, it smells particularly bad.
Although neutered pets are still territorial, they are far less likely to spray.
3. Fighting for affections
Cats are pretty simple creatures. They want to eat, sleep, eat some more, sleep some more, and during kitten season, they want to make kittens.
This desire to make kittens can make tomcats extremely frustrated, like a teenager without the ability to understand what’s happening to its body. The frustration can build into aggression, which is often re-directed to the nearest sentient being.
It’s not uncommon for families to end up the victim of scratches and bites from a previously placid puss.
4. Feel the love
Cats can often become more docile and affectionate after neutering. Even if they hadn’t displayed the redirected aggression mentioned above, there may have been some stress that was preventing your tomcat from being the gentle soul he could be.
5. Fewer unwanted cats and kittens
We’re ending with the obvious one, but as a charity that deals with such a high number of unwanted cats, we can’t leave it out. We all know it takes two to tango, and in an ideal world, every cat would be neutered.
Some people may feel that as they have a male cat, kittens aren’t their responsibility. The reality is that the owner of the female cat might feel the same way, and abandon a cat as soon as she becomes pregnant or an unexpected litter arrives.
With the cost of neutering being far less than the cost of raising a litter of 6 cats (who all by the way, need 3 vaccines each in the first year) there couldn’t be a simpler resolution this spring. So out you get, phone your vet and fix that pet.
