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"In today's throwaway society, pets have become just another disposable item. "

With 90 million dogs and cats alive in the United States, the pet population explosion is beginning to reach crisis proportions.

No official pet census has ever been taken, so officials vary in specific head counts of dogs and cats. Some experts, however, fully expect the number of such animals to climb to 200 million in the U.S. during the next decade.

The birthrates are worrisome enough. Dogs are about 15 times and cats at least 30 times more prolific than people.

But the pet boom is also big business. Your local pet shop—which now takes credit cards—is part of a $4.5 billion annual business that is encouraging propagation, not birth control.

As a result the United States—with more pets than any other country—faces the very real prospect of some of its larger cities being overrun by cats and dogs, perhaps within the next ten years.

To be sure, the benefits of owning pets are personal and intangible. The animals bring pleasure and companionship to millions of people of all ages. But statistics show that the boom in pets also has its seamy side.

Each year some $350 million is spent on U.S. animal control programs, most of it for killing unwanted pets and disposing of their carcasses. Every 50 minutes, on the average, a dog or cat is "put to sleep" at each of 1,800 pounds and shelters scattered throughout the U.S.

Relatively few dogs and cats delivered to animal pounds or shelters leave them alive. In 1972, for example, 17 million cats and dogs were "turned in". Of these, 13.5 million were destroyed. (The rest were returned to their owners, adopted by new owners or sold to medical research laboratories.)

U.S. pounds and shelters are turning into animal death mills. Methods of execution include asphyxiation, electrocution, gassing and drug injections. The Humane Society of the United States recommends a shot of sodium pentobarbital, which kills almost instantly, but many understaffed and penniless pounds are forced to devise jury-rigged death chambers which are more painful.

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