I come from a long line of animal lovers, and most of my family has been especially partial to cats. My wife Patti is the same way – she doesn’t even like chicken on the bone because it’s too reminiscent of its origin as a live bird.

When we got married last fall, she brought along her cat, Mozart, as part of a package deal. Except for the occasional love bite, he’s a pretty well-behaved cat, and he and I have taken to each other very easily. A few months before that, my own big, beloved orange-and-white tomcat, Krueger, ran off not to be seen again, so it was nice to have another cat around, although you never really “replace” one with another.

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Given all that, then, you’ll understand how we felt when we looked out our kitchen window one chilly night last December and saw a gray cat, obviously the mother, as she dragged a scavenged piece of discarded chicken across the concrete towards three very small kittens. Patti and I looked at each other, both knowing what the other was thinking, and that night we put out some dry food and water for them. Since that time, we’ve had daily visits from an extended family of half a dozen or more homeless neighborhood cats.

While most of them look reasonably healthy right now, it’s easy to see that being an alley cat is a pretty tough life. Of the three kittens, the smallest vanished after a couple of weeks. Next, a second one, whom we had dubbed Oliver because of his Dickensian existence, took sick and then never showed up again after a particularly wet and cold winter night. The third one is thriving and looks like he’ll make it.

The patriarch of the bunch appears to be a wiry old black tomcat with a torn-up ear and a once-broken bum leg, which earned him the moniker “Festus” after the limping “Gunsmoke” character. If this cat was a human, he’d be one of those grizzled old guys with a crewcut, some U.S. Marines tattoos and a busted nose whom you would never challenge to a bar fight (for those of you who go in for such things).

Seriously, however, I’ll bet each of us see cats and dogs every day wandering our neighborhoods with no home to go to. Some may be lost or abandoned, but many, especially the cats, were born to other homeless animals. You can debate whether or not one should feed them, but in our case we have a large back yard and they don’t bother anyone else, and we felt that we just couldn’t let them go hungry. The real message here is how vitally important it is to spay or neuter your pet.

These homeless animals lead a dangerous and unhealthy life. In my view, humanely controlling the stray animal population through spaying and neutering is the best thing you could do for them. If we can catch any of the backyard cats, they’re going straight to the vet for an operation and their shots.  There are lots of opportunities to have your pet spayed or neutered at a relatively low cost, and you can call the SPCA of Texas at 214-651-9611 for more information. Also, both the SPCA and the City of Dallas Animal Shelter are great places to adopt an animal that needs a home.

You may wish you could take all of them home with you, but even if you adopt just one, that one is far better off than it was before.