Unfortunately, it is pretty necessary.

It is very easy to be flippant about the bloggers and other folk who love their cats as I was yesterday, they can be most endearing creatures (the cats and bloggers 😉 ) that amuse and entertain, but left unchecked they can become an environmental menace. So spare a thought for those who have to address the problem.

Melanie Layton .

The RSPCA receives 18,000 cats and kittens each year and kills 12,000 of them by legal [lethal] injection.

Minnie Layton’s job is to clean up that mess.

For five days straight in a month-long roster, Minnie Layton puts cats and kittens to death.

Stray cats have a three-day shelf life, but if someone surrenders their own cat, they have just 24 hours.

And it is not pretty.

Unfortunately, it is pretty necessary.

The RSPCA would choke if she didn’t do her job.

Minnie Layton might spend three days looking after cats and kittens and then, on the fourth day come and collect the cats that the vet marks with a big “C” on the chart above their stall.

They all go off to “Central”, the centre at the RSPCA’s Fairfield home where they are killed.

After that, the cats get an injection in the stomach with a legal [lethal] mix of barbiturates.

And then there is the disposal.

“After the euthanasing we have to check to make sure that they have passed away,” Minnie explains.

“And after that we have to look after each body and dispose of each correctly.”

I vividly remember that before my family came to Australia we always had a few cats and in those days we did not ever have them spayed, it was the early sixties after all, but the downside to having so many cats was that they would have kittens and  sadly I remember  my mother took responsibility for those unwanted kittens  by drowning them in a bucket. It was sad, necessary, horrible and sobering lesson for the boy that I was then. My mother would be terribly upset at having to do it but you just can not find homes for an unending stream of kittens nor could we afford to pay a vet to do what was necessary. It was the sort of DIY that you won’t hear about on Burke’s backyard which is why I say hats off to someone like Melanie Layton, to spend your working day  euthanasing  unwanted cats and kittens must be the antithesis of an animal lover’s dream career.

I support the RSPA’s push to encourage all cat owners to be responsible with their pets and have them neutered just as I did when I last  owned a cat thirty  years ago.

Cheers Comrades

😉