On April 8th 2022 Scarborough animal services killed my neighbour's cat because they couldn’t locate the owner within THREE days. I got a text from my former neighbour the week he went missing, (we moved this past June) saying she wasn't sure if we still lived in that house but that her cat who is an outdoor cat that we knew well and loved very much was missing for almost a week now. She'd put up posters around the neighbourhood and had been looking for him all around the neighbourhood the last several days. He's very old now and she told us this past year they stopped letting him outside because they were worried about him, but he got out by accident. A few days later we got a call from her crying hysterically saying that someone had told them maybe they should start trying to call local shelters and maybe someone had picked him up and taken him there, so that's what she did. She ended up going online and found a photo of him posted by a shelter in Scarborough and then she called them and found out that they killed him after 3 days. Apparently when they get cats in, if the owner cant be located after THREE days he belongs to the city and they can do whatever they want with him and because he was old and frail they decided to kill him. Someone had picked him up and brought him there, he's microchipped but from another country, he used to live with the owners sister so the phone number couldn't get a hold of anyone. He usually didn't have a collar on because they worried he'd get tangled in something and god forbid hurt himself. So after 3 days when no one claimed him they killed him for absolutely no reason, just because he was old. AFTER THREE DAYS?! They couldn't even keep him for a WEEK??? What if the owners were out of town and didn't even know he was missing. For an outdoor cat 3 days missing is nothing, you don't start worrying/looking until almost a week goes by and their criteria is three days and then they euthanized him?? People need to know that these are our “laws” and animals are not safe in the shelter. These laws must be changed. Three days is not enough time to give families a chance to find their beloved pets before they are killed by the city. Demand justice for Neo and for laws to be changed. The shelters must be required to keep an animal for a minimum of 10 days, no less. If they had kept him just another few days his owner would have found him and he would still be alive today.

Sincerely,

Viktoriya