This has been a busy year for the non-profit animal welfare group, she said during a break at a cat adoption clinic held last Sunday at the Naturanimal & Pawtisserie Holistic Pet Center on Sherbrooke Street.

Volunteers with Steri-Animal have been working all summer, dealing with a population of stray pets that isn't getting any smaller.

Last week, the main branch of Montreal's SPCA reported that it, too, was dealing with a surplus of abandoned cats — most of them kittens. Presumably many people allowed their unspayed felines the run of the outside over the summer.

"Spring started early," said Heimann. "We had a mild spring, so cats were mating a lot earlier than usual and our fall has not been very bad either. So, basically, animals will mate when the days are longer. Now it's going to start to slow down a little bit."

When Steri-Animal got started three years ago, the idea was to prevent animals from having to go into shelters where they typically linger until they die. The adoption rate in shelters is notoriously low.

"We thought the best way to approach this was prevention," she said. "There's an awful lot of strays in Montreal. Quebec has the worst stray population in all of North America, because we have very loose (animal welfare) laws if any at all." Without getting into specifics, she said the group has been quite successful. "We've done a lot of cats in the three years that we've been operational."

During adoption day events, which are held periodically in different parts of Montreal, cats that have been sterilized and judged to be friendly are made available. There are also many kittens which are the byproducts of pregnant females before they've been sterilized.

"The answer to this is prevention, prevention, prevention," Heimann emphasized. "Euthanization does not work." She noted that even if you manage to euthanize half the population of a cat colony, the other half will still continue to reproduce.

Steri-Animal often receives calls from people reporting a stray mother cat with kittens that have taken up residency underneath the back balcony of the house. "We go in and we catch the mother and we sterilize her," she said.

"We release her back where she came from if the person is agreeable to that. The kittens that we usually take in we foster out and bring them up to par, get them vaccinated and we try to adopt them out."

There is, of course, a cost for all this, but Heimann pointed out that Steri-Animal's cats are as healthy as can be, although more homes are desperately needed. "We need help financially (and) we need help with good people who want to give good homes to animals."

For more information on Steri-Animal, go their web page: www.steri-animal.petfinder.org.">www.steri-animal.petfinder.org.">www.steri-animal.petfinder.org.