Regarding cutting the animal budget (EW April 20): The reality is, services provided are not nearly enough. Many rescues are bankrupting themselves as they struggle to take on the needs that Greenhill Humane Society, Eugene Animal Services and Lane County Animal Services are not providing. The small rescues are taking in the abandoned, unwanted, and those not quite tame enough.

Currently, GHS won’t even take strays. The recommendation is to leave them where they are, unless they are pregnant or injured. So a healthy, friendly, dumped stray kitty is left, until he/she becomes sick or injured, if it survives, before the shelter will take it.

Now, if you cut existing program funding, that means rescue organizations, without those resources, are going to get the phone calls. They can’t do it all.

Cutting animal related services encourages and enables animal abuse, animal neglect and animal cruelty, and you are guilty of the same.

And what are you going to do in a year or two, when all the kitties that do survive are breeding and the population explodes, and you get complaints from the citizens? What are you going to do?

Ignoring the problem doesn’t eliminate it. Unaltered cats will reproduce. A female can have several litters a year until her body gives out and she dies a horrible death. Many kittens won’t survive, dying of starvation, disease, predation, injury or abuse. But enough will survive to keep the population exploding. Surely, the city has access to funding that can keep this necessary resource available.

If Eugene wants to be known as a green place to live, animal care is a part of the solution.

Janetta Overholser

Cottage Grove

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