BONNYVILLE – The overpopulation of felines in the MD of Bonnyville is being dealt with one paw at a time.
The Bonnyville and District SPCA held its second spay and neuter clinic on Thursday, Sept. 24. The day saw just over 40 barn and stray felines coming in from the Ardmore-area.
The rural cat spay and neuter clinic was originally started by MD resident Silke Skinner in 2018 and the MD of Bonnyville agreed to pay for the pilot program. After seeing the success of the first year, the municipality reached out to the SPCA to see if they would continue it.
“The MD approached us because we’re a non-profit organization, we worked with them, and we’re able to access certain grants and different funding,” explained Charlene Rask, vice-president of the Bonnyville SPCA.
The local animal shelter took what it learned in the first year to make the day even better this time around.
“The process was faster and also because of COVID-19 we didn’t have as much traffic here,” explained shelter manager Judith Rodriguez. “Everything was done out in the parking lot. People came there, and they had already done everything online. They came in the morning, dropping the cats off to us, and we took them inside. It was very simple.”
Rask added, “Anything that we saw that might need some tweaking from last year, we were able to tweak it and then with COVID-19, it presented a few challenges because we had to do things a lot differently… Everybody's learning how to adapt to COVID-19 and everybody’s been very understanding. It was emailing forms, signing waivers beforehand and not the face-to-face and hand-to-hand contact because we can’t due to COVID-19. It actually went very smoothly and everyone was very understanding.”
The clinic was successful due to Bonnyville SPCA staff and volunteers, along with Bonnyville Vet clinic employees. By the end of the day, 42 cats were either spayed or neutered, and returned to the Ardmore area.
According to Rask, there were actually supposed to be 44 clients through this year.
“These are feral cats, so two couldn’t be caught,” she laughed. “We were actually surprised that it was just that, so it went really well.”
Although the rural cat spay and neuter clinic just completed its third year, it’s still going to be some time before the impacts are seen throughout the MD.
“When we take a small portion of the population, there’s still enough out there procreating so that we’re not going to see a big change unless we focus a sterilization program on one area for an extended period of time to see actual results,” noted Greg Benoit, owner and veterinarian with the Bonnyville Vet Clinic. “The actual locations of where these are from, there will probably be a difference but throughout the whole municipality, we might not notice a big difference for a period of time.”
Rodriguez noted the cats being taken in from the Ardmore area was due to their records showing a large number of stray cats came from there and it is hoped the numbers will decrease thanks to the clinic.
Along with preventing a significant increase in the stray animal population, ensuring diseases aren’t spread was another important aspect of the clinic for Benoit.
“If you have less of them, and healthier animals are obviously why we all got into the profession, to try and achieve that instead of having unchecked populations that are spreading disease and being dealt with in other potentially inhumane ways isn’t what we’re shooting for. We’re trying to weigh the scales in the other way.”
The Bonnyville SPCA has high hopes of continuing the program in the future and potentially expand into the Town of Bonnyville if funding allows.
“We’ll need to look for funding again because we did this through the MD and there’s only so much money to go around,” said Rask. “The more we can do this, the better off everybody will be if we can keep the numbers down. If you have an overpopulation of anything, you’re going to end up with disease, sickness, and different things going on. We don’t want that because we don’t want the animals to suffer. That’s the whole point of the SPCA to find these animals loving and caring homes, but if there’s too many of them then they all start getting sick and spreading something to somebody’s pet. We don’t want any of that to happen, this is all for the betterment of the animals and their lives.”
