08/20/05 Don't Kill, Spay and Neuter!
Animal Friends invites all citizens to act responsibly towards their companion animals
Animal Friends organizes an action in order to educate citizens on necessity of spaying and neutering of companion animals. The event will take place at Saturday, August 20, 2005 from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M., in Varsavska ulica in front of Europe theatre, where activists will also have a stall with informative material regarding spaying and neutering.
At 12 noon, the informative stall will be visited by the guardians (and their spayed & neutered companion animals) who will demonstrate an example to the rest of the citizens by showing the humane gesture of adopting abandoned animals. The guardians will also talk about the necessity of spaying and neutering. Detailed information on spaying and neutering will be provided by veterinarian Vlasta Brindl.
On the informative stall, citizens of Zagreb will also be able to learn about free of charge spaying and neutering of abandoned animals that is organized by Noah's Ark (phone: 01 2329663), and Blue Cross organization (GSM: 091 6214696).
With this action, which is directly linked to previous campaign "Family at Seaside, Dog in the Street?!" and "Don't Leave Me" (you can still see billboards from this campaign), Animal Friends wants to appeal to the people of Zagreb to act responsibly towards their companion animals and not to abandon them, because abandoned animals die horribly from starvation and thirst, or they are killed in traffic. Some animals end up in animal shelters, which is also a poor solution regarding the number of the already abandoned animals.
Just one cat and all her young in a period of seven years can give birth to 420,000 kittens, and one mother dog and her young during the same period of time can give birth to 67,000 puppies. The only prevention of this problem is spaying and neutering of owned companion animals and strays.
Spaying and neutering prevents uncontrolled enlargement of population of companion animals, unnecessary violent killings, number of unwanted puppies/kittens and everlasting problem of finding good homes for them. Furthermore, spaying and neutering prevents problems of walking your female dog while in heat and gathering male dogs around your house for the same reason, the psychological suffering of animal and running away from home searching for mate in order to satisfy natural urge. Spaying and neutering is ideal prevention of diseases such as breast or uterus cancer, the cancer of prostate or testicular cancer, and spayed and neutered animals live longer. Nowadays these surgical procedures are preformed routinely and just after few hours animal is recovered.
The Animal Friends branches from Split, Varazdin, Krizevci, and Koprivnica will also take part in this action.
Small pictures on the right: Just born kittens drowned in a plastic bag in the sea. Porec, April 6, 2005