Letters on showing respect, trapping cats, beauty shops

We deserve to be treated equally

I am a retired school teacher who started teaching in the 1960s. All my students knew from day one that if they showed respect for each other, I was happy. No matter what the gender, we deserve to be treated equally.

It bothers me tremendously to see how society has allowed people to be put in leadership roles who feel this is not at the top of their list. It should be.

We now have a president who has degraded females and backed a former news host who is accused of the same thing. What has happened to our values?

I do not care about all the great qualities these men are supposed to possess. Why do people feel they can look the other way?

It is a tragedy that society has come to the place that money and power have replaced what used to be important – respect.

A humane solution

Trap and kill is what the city has been doing for decades, and it’s not working. There are more cats now than ever before. Trap-neuter-vaccinate-return (TNVR) has been proven to reduce the cat population in many communities across the United States.

The percentage of cats that Wichita Animal Services euthanizes has dropped significantly since 2012. Since 2012, the group Friends of Felines, KS, has altered more than 3,100 cats. Our TNVR numbers are increasing each year, just as the number of cats/kittens taken into the Animal Shelter have decreased. Coincidence? I think not.

The benefits of TNVR include: It instantly stops the increase in population – no more homeless kittens born; it stops the behaviors of mating (fighting, roaming, crying, spraying, marking territory); cats become healthier without the stress of mating; cats receive a rabies vaccination; cats are ear tipped (the tip of the left ear is cut straight across to indicate the cat is altered and vaccinated); cats are returned to their territory, which keeps other unaltered cats from moving in and starting the reproduction cycles all over again.

Let your Wichita City Council representative know that you want a humane solution to the community cat overpopulation issue and that you support TNVR.

Better investment

A recent Opinion Line contributor correctly stated that the primary purpose of health insurance is not to provide health care, a separate industry, but to insure healthy people. Insurance companies do that based on statistics about the health care costs they’d have to pay for such clients.

Before Obamacare, they likely wouldn’t insure people with an existing condition because the statistics on health care costs for them would require such large premiums that the insurance company would be accused of seeking excessive profits.

But if you want to invest in a profitable business, choose your local beauty shop, or even better a restaurant, because they have double or triple the profit levels of health insurance companies. That’s based on published financial data, not my supposition.

This story was originally published April 29, 2017 at 5:04 AM with the headline "Letters on showing respect, trapping cats, beauty shops."