For those of you who don't know about my parents and their cat colony... Let's just say they had a few cats and didn't think it was important to get them spayed/neutered. So they had kittens. And then THEY had kittens. And so on and so forth until the house was wall to wall cats and my parents were still in denial that it had gotten out of hand. They were quite content to just blame me, saying that when I was a kid and brought the first cats home, I started the problem and now I should be fixing it. So years went by, a lot of the cats ran away from the crowded filthy house and were never seen again. A lot of the rest died from the crowded conditions. The survivors kept right on reproducing. Only a few kittens were ever re-homed. The rest just stayed there in the house, the poor things. I tried to bring supplies for them over the years. I tried a lot of things. I even adopted and/or rehomed a few whenever I could. And I pushed the spay/neuter issue every chance I got. But I barely made a dent in the problem. They had become convinced they were not their cats and not their responsibility, so they were just going to assign the blame to me and ignore the problem. I swear, the only reason any of the cats were taken care of at all was because the SPCA kept lurking around and threatening my parents. I don't even want to think of what would happen if it weren't for them...

Well, they're down to 5 cats now. To help out, I adopted two of them and will be taking them along when I move. To see pics of my boys, just check out the thread here where I introduced all my kitties. Anyhoo, so I finally gave up and offered to pay for the neutering of all the males in the house. Not only that, but despite my mother's protests I took them for their neutering and there's no going back now! The two remaining females are between pregnancies, thank goodness, and all males are neutered now. The females will go to get spayed as soon as I can afford to take them, and that will be the end of the cat colony. Hopefully once I move, since three cats is a perfectly manageable number for a house as big as my parents', the remaining kitties will be treated more like pets and will live out their days happily. So yay for progress! Spay and neuter your animals, people! Don't get overwhelmed and turn into my parents! >

Now I gotta get started on the OUTDOOR cat colony that appears to have formed from some of the cats who escaped the house but didn't disappear... :-