[quote]By Sharon L. Peters, Special for USA TODAY
A very rich, very impatient retired surgeon wants the pet overpopulation solved.
So Gary Michelson has put a hard-to-ignore enticement on the table: $75 million.
The person or group that comes up first with a safe, one-time non-surgical means to sterilize male and female cats and dogs gets $25 million, Michelson’s non-profit Found Animals Foundation will announce today at the National Spay/Neuter Conference in Chicago. And up to $50 million more will be available to support the research of one or several individuals who come forward with plausible approaches.
“No one will stop what they’re doing and turn their attention to this problem for $10 million. That’s not enough,” says Michelson, 59, a retired Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon who invented and patented hundreds of surgical instruments, won an infringement case in 2005 and landed at No. 317 on Forbes’ 400 Richest Americans list last month.
Animal lover Michelson is convinced, like most animal-welfare experts, that if unwanted litters never materialized, U.S. shelters wouldn’t be euthanizing 4 million to 6 million animals a year.[/quote]
Let’s hope that someone can come up with a solution.
If someone could come up with an injection or something to give an animal orally that would safely steilize them that would be a giant leap in controlling the over populaton of animals around the world
another good thing is that, if it’s general enough to use for cats and dogs, perhaps it’d also work on rabbits, foxes, pigs, brumbies, camels and other feral animals in Australia (insert your own feral problem animals for your own country instead). selectivity and a safe method of delivery that spares native animals would be necessary.
even better would be the possibility of using this on the most invasive feral animal ever, humans.
Off-topic comment:
Back home, until very recently, it was forbidden -yes, by law- for women to have a procedure, such as tie up tubes or esterilization, not to have babies permanently, unless for medical reasons and with their partner’s consent. Lo and behold, after they did not need to ask the State or their husbands permission to do it, and had a choice, you should see the dramatic drop in population growth. As a matter of fact, we’ll be catching up with Taiwan in terms of negative growth! Imagine if no operation was involved…
On topic comment:
I hope this effort is brought to fruition. Not all animals respond well to the operations. My Toto did pretty well, for partial epidural anesthesia.
However, I do not think costs are the biggest obstacles, but rather people’s idea that “you are taking something away if the pet does not have the experience of giving birth”. I suggest peoople who think like this are giving the option of natural birth -no anesthetic, like cats and dogs- for six kids. Triplets at least.
[quote=“twonavels”]My dad used to tell me that they sterilized the dogs on the farm by pushing them into orange bags and biting off their balls. Could that be true?[/quote]The people who pushed them into orange bags bit them off?
Yes, and it’s those big bags that hold oranges. They have holes. Maybe I should ask my dad, but I really remember this story. I think I was about 8 or so.
