What are people thinking when they abandon pets?

[hamsterjill]

5. This is called "making YOUR problem someone ELSE'S problem".

I rescue cats in San Antonio, Texas and we see this ALL the time. People just move and leave both cats and dogs behind. Especially cats. Because they think that cats can fend for themselves.

Uh...no...that's not how it works when you've had a cat that has been used to being fed regularly and doesn't know how to hunt, keep out of the way of cars or coyotes.

I'm guessing that none of the five cats that your Grandmother's neighbor abandoned have been fixed either, have they? If they have - at least that's one tiny positive. It still doesn't make it right that the person left them without providing for them.

If they are not fixed, then this is the beginning of why we have stray cats everywhere...People being irresponsible and making THEIR problem someone ELSE's problem.

I don't care how poor this person may or may not have been. If they took on the responsibility of those five cats before the move, then WHEN they moved, they still had a responsibility to make arrangements for the cats.

In my over 30 years of cat rescue, I find that more times cats are abandoned simply because it wasn't convenient to take the cats. This is much more common than it truly being a situation where someone is having to move to a place that doesn't allow the cats, and that because of their economic situation, that is the ONLY place they have to go. It is almost always a matter of the human being not doing enough, and if you delve deeper, a lot of the times you find that the human is simply tired of having to deal with the work that is involved in having pets.