In Indonesia, a growing number of volunteers are working to control the exploding population of stray cats through desexing programs.
In a small, indistinct house in Jakarta's southern districts, a woman in full scrubs is silently and efficiently desexing an anaesthetised cat. Next to the table, another four cats wearing nappies lie in a row, their bellies shaved and exposed with a freshly stitched wound, sleeping off their anaesthesia. This is the world of Indonesia's underground vets, working to desex as many cats as possible, to help stall the explosive growth of felines on the streets of big cities.
'Regularly trapping and neutering cats will help maintain the population number for about two years, but if we don't do it, the cat number will explode,' said Vivi Sebayang from Rumah Steril, an organisation that catches street cats to be spayed and then released again. With a group of volunteers, she runs monthly cat-catching sessions in Jakarta, usually around university campuses or train stations where people tend to feed strays. 'Every day it costs me quite a lot of money to buy enough food to feed 15 cats, but I don't own one myself, so it's okay,' said Koh Aliong, a local store owner who helps maintain the stray population at a university campus in the southern district of Depok. 'People have dumped tiny kittens around here, so what can I do but look after them and feed them?' he said, as he helped the cat catchers trap felines for spaying.The Jakarta Provincial Food, Marine and Agriculture Agency estimates there are 860,000 cats in the Jakarta municipal area alone.) But that only covers about half of the greater Jakarta metropolis, meaning there are likely well over 1.5 million cats roaming the streets and yards of Indonesia's capital.'So if someone doesn't like having a stray cat around their house, they will often take the cat and dump it in a wet market where there's some food,' she said.Her organisation is able to spay a female cat for about $30, or about $25 for a male ca
CAT POPULATION DESEXING ANIMAL WELFARE INDONESIA STREET CATS
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