Stop the ‘invasion’
When is this insanity going to stop? Illegal immigration will continue unchecked until Congress revises our laws. Call it what you want, but this is an invasion of foreigners who think they have the right to come to America and defy our laws and take advantage of our outdated immigration laws.
Illegal immigration is wrong and harmful because it not only marginalizes legal migrants, it is overburdening our educational, medical and social services systems.
Providing these services also puts a strain on the budgets of those agencies providing the services.
The federal government spends on the average over $200 million annually flying home those that are not granted asylum. It is also not true that illegals consume less than what they contribute to the economy, including tax revenues.
What happens when the well runs dry? Already, global warming is having an effect on our weather and our water and food supply. Enough already.
Don Baker
Volcano
Sterilization works
Grant Sizemore’s recent letter (“Solving cat problem,” Your Views, Nov. 4) only adds to the misinformation and scaremongering on the subject of unowned, free-roaming “community” cats, thereby undermining any chance for reasonable discussions and fact-based reporting.
Best Friends Animal Society operates more large-scale targeted sterilization programs than any other organization in the country.
As such, we are in a unique position to comment on the positive impact such programs have not only on the cats, but on animal shelters and the communities they serve.
The process is simple: Cats are caught, evaluated by veterinarians, vaccinated, spayed or neutered, and returned to their original outdoor homes, no longer to have kittens. And the successes we’ve seen, in our own programs and others, echo the findings of research studies demonstrating the effectiveness of targeted sterilization programs to stabilize and reduce the population of cats at a local level and the broad public support such programs enjoy.
As numerous studies have demonstrated, only two methods have proven effective at reducing the number of free-roaming cats: intensive eradication efforts such as those employed on small oceanic islands (the largest of which is less than 3 percent the size of Hawaii County, and uninhabited), or targeted sterilization efforts.
The horrific methods and astronomical costs involved in eradication campaigns make them a nonstarter in public policy conversations. Targeted sterilization programs, by contrast, offer a commonsense, animal-friendly, effective and economical alternative. No wonder such programs are becoming increasingly popular in communities large and small, urban and rural.
Savvy readers will no doubt have noticed that Sizemore’s “solutions” address only pet cats, offering policymakers nothing to work with when it comes to managing community cats (the subject of the original article). But tax-paying constituents expect solutions, however imperfect. In this case, the solution is an intensive sterilization program.
Peter J. Wolf
Research/policy analyst,
Best Friends Animal Society, Utah
