Keep the Cats at SMU - Save the Feral Cat Program at Southern Methodist University

SMU, instead of shooting the cats, how about educating your students that pets are not disposable and cannot be abandoned with impunity. Then the colony might stop growing every year.

Stop being inhuman.

The cats are being humanely managed. If there's no cats indoors, there will be no fleas indoors.

Please do not destroy this established and well cared for colony.

The eyes if the world are on this. Make your students, alums, and the communities you are part of, proud to be associated with your institution.

Please, be kind and don't get rid of the feral cat community, they are beneficial, without them you'll get rats and mice which are really dangerous. The best you could do is neuter/ spay the female population, there are places who will do it for free, or you could use a tiny fraction of the budget you had for the elimination to spay/ neuter them instead. Please , I beg you

this is horrendous. It certainly makes you look like uncaring idiots.

This has been a cost effective way to keep a cap on the amount of cats on campus, while making sure they are minimum have their vaccinations.

After learning of this I am sorry I sent my daughter to this school. There are better ways to deal with fleas.

I find this decision of SMU to be cruel and un-informed to the feral cat population on their campus. To hire an exterminator to kill a managed colony is so very disturbing. Thought the SMU people were supposed to be educated people. Evidently Not!!

Fleas are controlled using medications and and preventatives. Your barbaric actions endangered the cats. Cats are very vulnerable to stress. The campus benefits greatly by maintaining the Feral Cat Program and campus administrators should apologize for their actions.

As a feral cat advocate for the past 15 years I'm appalled by the callousness of the SMU regents. This program started by Kittico Cat Rescue in 1999 has served the SMU and surrounding areas very well Without any money or support from SMU. All privetly funded by feral rescues and private donors and volunteers. The nerve of SMU to put this cats in danger has more than angered me.

I understand the need to control pests, but cats aren't pests. They eat pests. Please do not get rid of a program that works. So many others today don't.

SMU Law Alum

Would you like to get rid of a few cats and fleas and be overrun by rats and mice instead? Would you like to risk being shot by idiots with guns out shooting cats? Would you like kids to be hurt by wounded cats who were not quite"humanely" killed by said idiots? Would you like to have decaying carcasses of said cats around? Would you like to have the feral cat population increase when the Feral Cat Group can't spay/neuter the feral cats any more, or take excess kittens to be placed in homes?

The reaction of the SMU EOC is deplorable and a reasonable solution working in tandem with the Feral Cat volunteers should be reached.

Seriously? Use flea control, do not harm the cats or have someone else take them and harm them.

Unacceptable.

The fate of the instigator's children and family shall be the same as these cats. I would risk my life to make it so.

Those cats were my friends and study-time inspiration while I was a student at SMU. A flea problem indicates a problem with humans, not the cats. It means that additional measures should be taken to provide the cats with *better* health care, NOT inhumane trapping and eradication. Please treat them like the community members they are, not pests.