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Without round-up-and-kill measures it seems apparent that cat licensing will only work to increase, not decrease, the number of homeless cats. Faced with citations and penalties for not complying cat caretakers who can't afford the new license fees will be forced to surrender their animals to the local shelter or abandon them to fend for themselves. Neighborhood cats, cats in doorstep colonies or multi-cat households, cherished pets owned by seniors on restricted incomes, feral cats with caretakers on limited budgets. These are the kinds of cats who will be most at risk, and for whom a licensing mandate could well be fatal. Of course, for the stray and abandoned cats already in the community, licensing will do nothing. CLAIM: Cat licensing will help decrease shelter euthanasia. Since cat licensing will likely result in more cats being surrendered to shelters and abandoned in the community, since it will not appreciably affect redemptions, and since it may very well become a vehicle for round-up-and-kill campaigns, it is difficult for us to see how it would result in a decrease in shelter euthanasia. CLAIM: Cat licensing will raise money to help fund animal control agencies. Cat licensing will cost local governments and taxpayers money, not raise it, resulting in a net loss to animal control and/or other vital government services. Indeed, we doubt whether revenues raised would even cover basic administrative expenses. For example, each license fee collected -and most proposals we've seen set the fee between $5 and $10 - will have to cover the costs of manufacturing, handling, storing and mailing the actual licenses (andlor implanting microchips), handling the checks and cash received, issuing receipts, recording and filing the necessary data on each cat and owner, updating the data as needed, responding to public questions and comments, mailing out renewal notices and reminders, preparing accounting statements and annual program reports, etc. This list doesn't include overhead or initial start- up expenses, like hiring and training staff to run the new program and developing ne computer programs and databases. And if the fees collected won't cover basic administrative expenses, they certainly won't cover the enormous costs of public awareness campaigns and enforcement. As noted above, "voluntary" compliance with cat licensing mandates is notoriously low. To raise compliance rates, the community will have to be made aware of the new mandate: door-to-door canvassing, city and countywide mailings, advertisements in local print media -all bear significant costs. And these campaigns will have to be repeated on a regular basis to maintain public awareness. Of course, these efforts alone won't ensure compliance, and they will have to be backed by meaningful enforcement. New enforcement staff will have to be hired, or existing staff taken away from other essential duties, in order to patrol the community for unlicensed cats, respond to complaints, issue citations, prepare reports,etc. And all these costs will have to be paid by local taxpayers, either through higher taxes or through cuts in other vital government services CLAIM: Dog owners contribute to animal control costs through licensing fees; IPs time cat owners pay their fair share. Just as licensing fees aren't likely to cover the real costs of a cat licensing program, we strongly doubt whether the fees now paid by dog owners cover much more than the basic costs of administering dog licensing programs. From a fiscal standpoint, therefore, local governments and taxpayers, not to mention dog owners, may well be better off if mandatory dog licensing were simply abolished. In any event, enacting another costly government program that won't pay for itself isn't the way to give dog owners the equity they seek. No doubt there will be animal control agencies and contracting humane 3