Jenny DePietro said she’s noticed an abundance of stray cats in her yard for the past 20 years, underscoring a potential problem occurring near her Lancaster home.
She finds that Lancaster’s stray cat problem has increased over the years.
There’s no doubt the city has a problem with both stray and feral cats, said Corey Schoonover, executive director of the Fairfield Area Humane Society, but there’s a narrow variety of solutions at hand to fix the problem.
Schoonover said part of the overpopulation problem stems from residents failing to spay or neuter their pets and not being able to find shelters or homes for the kittens and setting them free.
“There aren’t any city or government agencies that deal with stray cats, so they’re pushed onto nonprofits,” Schoonover said. “(And there’s) not enough of us and not enough funds where we can go through and take care of the problem.”
Schoonover added that realistically, there is a stray cat problem anywhere.
Arianna Rinaldi-Eichenberg, president and spay/neuter coordinator for the Athens County Humane Society, said the problem has stayed fairly constant in Athens, too.
More than 70 percent of all cats that go to pounds and shelters throughout the nation are killed, according to statistics from Alley Cat Allies, a national advocacy organization dedicated to the protection and humane treatment of cats.
That statistic includes stray and feral cats. The former, typically abandoned by an owner, can generally be adopted into new homes, but the latter, wild cats that tend to avoid humans, generally cannot.
“When (my family and I) lived in the city, we had two pregnant stray cats in our yard,” DePietro said. “We had to catch all the kittens.”
Although the DePietros ended up keeping one of them, they had trouble finding homes for the others. All the animal shelters were too full to accept any more cats.
An animal shelter in Athens shut down several years ago, Rinaldi-Eichenberg said, which “encourages spay and neuter, since there is no place to drop off one’s cats, unless they are dumped somewhere else, which is illegal.”
Both the Athens County Humane Society and the Fairfield Area Humane Society offer spay and neuter services when residents bring in a cat. The cost for the service is about $55.
Rinaldi-Eichenberg added that the Athens County Humane Society subsidizes some of the cost to Athens County residents.
“I did not know about the fee, but I would guess that in Lancaster that would probably deter people (from helping stray cats),” DePietro said. “I don’t know if enough people care about feral cats that they’d pay a fee to get them fixed.”
@KellyPFisher
