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Why does a Computer Information Systems major have such a penchant for creating awareness of and accessibility to resources that combat the cat overpopulation crisis? I will just say that I have seen enough dead and dying cats in my thirty years.

During my time working with the Humane Society as a Community Cat Coordinator, each TNR job easily brought the shelter 20-30 cats per week to receive spay/neuter treatment. Just a few months of this work brought over 250 cats in the Montgomery County area of Ohio to our shelter for spay/neuter treatment but compared to the tens of millions across the country, that was just a drop in the ocean of tireless population reduction effort.

Think about it… if a single female cat who is not spayed and is estimated to have around twelve kittens in just one year, then those kittens all have their own litters that estimate to twelve kittens per each kitten from the first litter, there would be around one-hundred and forty-four kittens as a result of the original single female cat. So the idea is that every year, you would multiply the number of cats that year by twelve. After eight years of cats reproducing without any spay/neuter treatment, even if it started with just one single female cat having that first litter, there would be an estimated population of two million stray cats.

I firmly believe that we as humans owe it to the animals we allow in our homes and hearts to help not just create, but sustain an ecosystem that will offer sanctuary and vitality for those animals. This is where my intrigue as it pertains to computer information systems meet my passion for animal welfare and the advocacy for a broader public access to comprehensive animal care education. I recognize that there is work to be done and I have been doing just that.

Over the past year, I have been drafting, modeling, and developing a native application that would serve the animal care field while simultaneously serving the public in a way that would, in theory, create networks of self-sufficiency where end users will be able to assist each other in lieu of immediate shelter/animal control assistance for low – tier issues. If these networks are sustainable, then entities local to those networks would see lower web, phone, and foot traffic which would subsequently allow for increase in productivity, even with minimal staffing.