As a member of the animal rescue community, I'm grateful that State Rep. Stan Watson (D-Decatur) has proposed a bill to outlaw gas chambers to euthanize homeless animals. Lethal injection is more humane than gassing, but unfortunately, the result is the same: death for innocent homeless animals or those that can't find their way home.

We wouldn't have to debate the method of euthanizing homeless animals if people who truly care for animals had theirs spayed or neutered.

Animals are euthanized because of pet overpopulation, a staggering problem. According to Stopping Pet Overpopulation Together (www.SPOTsociety.org), as of 2005, 130,000 animals were impounded in 19 metro Atlanta animal control shelters. Of the animals impounded, only 8 percent were reclaimed and only 22 percent were adopted or transferred to rescue agencies.

This means that animal control operations were forced to euthanize almost 60 percent of the animals they impounded because of a lack of families in metro Atlanta willing or able to adopt them. The story is even worse in some remote counties, where as many as 90 percent of homeless animals were euthanized for lack of adoptive families. What a tragedy! What's even more tragic is that spaying and neutering are such simple solutions.

There are very few reasons not to neuter, and many compelling reasons for neutering, a pet. Spayed pets are less likely to roam, get lost, spray or mark their territory. (If you've smelled tomcat urine once, you know how unpleasant it is.) Neutered pets are less aggressive toward humans and other animals. Of the animals that get lost and hit by cars, most are intact males.

More important, spayed pets are healthier pets. Dogs and cats have their own sexually transmitted diseases, many fatal. Feline leukemia, for example, is spread through fighting and mating. Spayed female cats have no risk of uterine infection or uterine, ovarian or cervical cancer.

Six years ago I looked out my kitchen window and saw a mother cat depositing three kittens in my yard. I began caring for them and trying to find organizations that would rescue them without threat of euthanizing. The responses were so disheartening that they changed my life: I founded an organization that rescues homeless animals and keeps them healthy and happy until they are adopted into permanent homes. Our goal is to help end pet overpopulation in Georgia through sterilization and high-quality adoption and by providing spay/neuter services and pet-care education to people in the community. Fortunately, today there are other organizations that have joined the fight, and pet owners and people who find homeless animals have more resources today than ever before. But thousands of animals put to death each year alone shows we have a long way to go.

If you want to really understand the problem, go to your local county animal shelter and look into the eager, hopeful eyes of the animals there. Then know that six out of every 10 of those animals will be killed by the end of the month. It's the real-life version of those heart-wrenching TV commercials about homeless animals desperate for someone to give them a home.

Watson is on the right track, and we can do even better. Spaying and neutering can slash the number of unlucky homeless animals, and we won't be forced to decide the most humane way of killing them.

> Samantha Shelton is executive director of Furkids, www.furkids.org, a 501(c)(3), charitable, nonprofit animal rescue organization in Atlanta.