Feral pets represent a complicated question for animal lovers. On one hand, anyone with half a heart who sees a dog or a cat that's obviously homeless and hungry is going to have some desire to help it. But the easiest and most obvious way to help them, which is simply to give them food, can exacerbate the problem in the long run by sustaining local populations of feral animals and making it more likely that they'll make more little feral animals. To actually help individual feral pets without encouraging the growth of feral populations, you have to not only feed the animals, but also get them spayed and neutered. That takes a lot of time, not to mention money, so it's rare to find someone actually willing to go that far. According to a story on Tampa Bay Online,Donald Tardy, drummer for Florida death-metal legends Obituary, is one of them.According to the story, "Tardy tends to more than 20 colonies, some with as few as two cats, others with nearly 30. He carefully protects their locations; some people are capable of unimaginable cruelty, while others find colonies a convenient place to dump unwanted cats. Every day he checks on 'my gang,' feeding the cats and, when necessary, getting them veterinary care." He also traps and neuters new members of the colonies, and when he runs across a cat that obviously comes from a domestic situation, or a litter of not-yet-wild kittens, he'll try and find them a home.
Tardy estimates that taking care of all of the cats costs him about $20,000 a year.
Way to be kick-ass on two entirely different levels, dude.
In tribute, some vintage Obituary live footage:
No comments:
Post a Comment