It’s hateful when people refer to a spayed or neutered animal as “it,” as though ability to breed is the only measure of gender. We don’t do that with people. My cat is a she.

I had the loan of a car and went to the Burnside Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) shelter to look for a kitten. I did see kittens there, but a three-year-old cat they called Carolli had been there the longest — more than three months. I thought that was long enough, so I took her. I changed her name to Moochie (also, when I am talking mush, Smooch, Smoochie, Smew or Moo-moo). She is a good cat, very sociable and possessed of two quirks: she has no whiskers and likes to be vacuumed.

One morning, still groggy, I was at the kitchen table going through The Daily News. There was a large business insert, and I got to page 47 of it (shows how sleepy I was) and froze. There was an ad for the SPCA, with a picture of my cat crowned by a large banner that said Abandoned.

I jumped up and searched for her. In my sleepy state I wondered how she could have escaped over-night and made it so quickly into the paper. Of course she was still in the apartment, stretched out in her magnificence on half the bed.

I called the SPCA, and it turned out the picture of her had been taken before she was adopted. Now when I still see this ad, I laugh. It’s even tacked up on the wall over Moochie’s food bowl. I tease her sometimes, telling her she could go back to where she came from if she doesn’t start pulling her weight and doing some house work.

November is Adopt a Cat Month at the SPCA. There are about twenty-five cats at the shelter now. None of them will be as wonderful as Moochie, but any one of them would like to go home with you.

If two cats, one unspayed and one non-neutered, get together and a litter of kittens results, and each of those kittens tells two friends and they tell two friends (so to speak), in just seven years there will be 420,000 cats as a result. Which may explain why getting your cat spayed or neutered is both Bob Barker’s signature sign off at the end of his TV game show The Price is Right, and what David Ness, the executive director of the local SPCA, chooses to say to me when asked what the prime message is from the SPCA.

He says the number of roaming cats in HRM is estimated to be between 150,000 and 300,000 cats, including feral cats and cats who are let outside. He says responsible pet owning means spaying or neutering.

The SPCA gets a grand total of $CDN 3,000-dollars a year from the provincial government; it’s 98.5 per cent funded by the public. Which explains why it costs $100-dollars to adopt a cat, a figure I had thought of as high even though it includes the first set of needles and a spay or neuter.

So I did grumble as I forked over that big money, but when Ness tells me that a healthy cat will not be put down no matter how long it stays in the shelter, and that the nine dedicated staff earn very low wages, I feel much better about where my money has gone.

And Moochie is worth a million bucks.