This season has been horrific in the numbers of unwanted litters. Instead of the usual four or five kittens born each time, this year it is averaging five and six. Even first time queens are dropping more offspring than usual.

To make matters worse, more and more pets are being left on our doorsteps, often pregnant or with kittens in tow and our donations have dwindled drastically. At a cost of well over $100 per kitten in fostering and vet expenses, the influx of so many animals is taking its toll. We are not a shelter, and each cat/kitten dumped on us requires a foster home, which are also in short supply.

At present I have a young, very friendly mom with six newborns in my spare bathroom. This family was left in a box on our porch July 29th. The kittens were wet and mom was still bloody from giving birth. Luckily, all seem healthy and strong, but this is not always the case.

On August 5th, three still-nursing tame kittens were snatched off a conveyor belt on their way to being crushed at a recycling plant in Santa Maria! They must have been placed there by someone, as they are too small to have climbed aboard on their own. This was truly a dastardly deed.

The lucky kittens are safe with us, but how can anyone have such little value for life as to throw a living thing away as if it were mere trash? Better to have spayed the mother or aborted the kittens, rather than have let them be born only to be killed in such a horrific manner. If these little ones’ mom is still out there, she will go into heat again within two weeks and have another litter. What will happen to those kittens? In the meantime she will be going through painful drying up and mental anguish searching for her kittens.

Then there is the feral mom who chose the trunk of a car to bear her kittens. When they were discovered, one kitten was dead and the other five were in distress. Since they were rescued, including the successful trapping of the mother, two more have died.

After more than twenty years of successfully working to curb the breeding of feral cats in Santa Barbara County, the abandonment of intact pets recently has resulted in a new swelling of colony populations. In addition to that, the incidence of FIV and feline leukemia appears to be increasing in the north county. If your pets are outdoors, they are at risk of coming into contact with an infected animal, especially when in breeding mode.

We hear over and over from people loath to take their kittens or pets to the shelters because they are afraid of euthanasia. Dumping them on someone else’s porch is not the answer, nor is it a responsible action.

Please, if you have intact cats and don’t want kittens, have your pets spayed/neutered BEFORE they become pregnant, or abort before a litter is born. For those who don’t believe in these practices I ask, is it really better to “let nature take its course,’ only to abandon the resultant issue and have them die gruesome deaths from exposure, starvation or predation? Is it right to dump them on someone else or, worse, make sport of their deaths?