Because my mother has an inexplicable fear of cats – can't be in a room with one, has to have somebody scoop up the animal and take it outside – she is possibly the best friend the overall cat population has. Unlike people who like cats, Dorothy Lank of southern California will never keep a cat locked up in a studio apartment next to a road construction crew, until the cat becomes so neurotic, its hips stop working.

She will not be found someday in a decrepit house living among two dozen cats named after obscure character actors – with cat business in the sink, cat hair a eight-of-an-inch thick on the antique rugs, and a stench you'd get if a jet full of rotten pork crashed and exploded into a warehouse full of dirty socks.

Most important of all, she will never feed strays and allow them to breed until there are so many of them they decide to start their own record label.

And that, frankly, makes her an exception. Every year, the newspapers carry another story about some local pet population gone out of hand because someone with a little extra maternal instinct started giving them cold cuts. The latest in our area was in Wayne. A man had been feeding a couple of feral cats, and, as happens when you turn your back on cats for five minutes, they had a series of extremely loud romantic encounters, and multiplied a few times over. A volunteer animal rescue group had to go trap the animals so they could neuter them, shelter them, and possibly lecture them about cocaine abuse.

And if in this case we're talking about seven or eight cats, that, I assure you, is nothing. In wealthy communities where people own a lot of land, I've heard of cases where people let 20, 30 cats take over their barn. Then the land owner dies – always alone, for some reason – and the cats starve or start foraging in other people's property, or learn to pick pockets, or form gangs and buy matching leather jackets.

As a result:

1) Neighborhood kids try petting the cats. The cats eat them.

2) Oddly, when a cat goes to the bathroom, it doesn't duck into a museum or coffee shop. Instead, it gets in your yard and finds someplace you'd neeeeeever think of.

3) When the government or a rescue group finally takes the cats off the street, the animals are often completely unadoptable. They're too accustomed to living out of garbage cans, and in any case most people like to have their cats as kittens – which are cute and look adorably confused when you shut them up in a silverware drawer. Trying to domesticate a feral cat is sort of like adopting a 37-year-old junkie, making him wear a little sailor suit and calling him Peaches.

So the cats get stuck in little cages for awhile, until, in many cases, the final result:

4) One of my favorite euphemisms: Euthanizing. Here's what it means. They stick a needle into the cat, and the cat dies. They kill it. With sodium pentathol, I think. In 1998, which is the most recent year for which data is available, 48 percent of animals coming to the state's shelters were put to sleep, according to Diana Jeffrey, the director of the Animal Federation of New Jersey. That's about 48,195 animals. Passaic County in that same period "euthanized" 936 dogs and 859 cats. This, I think we can all agree, is way too many dogs.

The solution to all this is insanely simple. If you take any responsibility for a dog or cat – if you feed it, if you shelter it, if you date it, however briefly – get it neutered. A number of groups including Jeffrey's will do it for free.

It's the biggest favor you could do for the animal and all its unborn puppies or kittens. It's also the biggest favor you could do for me. My parents are visiting in November. The streets must be cleared.