Cat Rescue Dunedin may have the answer.
The charitable organisation is giving jilted lovers an opportunity to pay $25 to have a rescue cat desexed — and the best part is, you get to name it after your ex.
"Because some creatures just shouldn’t breed," Cat Rescue Dunedin board of trustees chairwoman Debby Foster joked.
She said they had been "absolutely inundated" with calls about it, and she expected interest would increase as Valentine’s Day got closer.
While it was meant to be a bit "light-hearted and fun", it could also possibly be a little cathartic.
She said the calls were predominantly from women, but there had been some from men as well.
Given the high number of female callers, there was likely to be a flood of female kittens going to new homes with names like Grant, Hamish, Tim, Mark or Matthew.
"One of the funniest ones was a woman who wanted to have a kitten desexed and named after her partner’s ex — ‘Princess Voldemort, she who shall not be named’.
"We also had a lady who wanted us to find the biggest, dumbest, ugliest ginger and call it a certain name which I can’t repeat. We’ll just call him ‘Bleep’."
All of the names were being put on the organisation’s web page, but they were being careful not to publish people’s last names or anything else that might identify them.
She said Cat Rescue Dunedin was like every charity — it was scratching for money.
The Valentine’s Day desexing initiative came from a cat rescue organisation in the United States, she said.
"I was in the States last year and thought it was an amazing idea.
"Desexing cats is so important because we have a number of colonies of wild cats around Dunedin at the moment, and they all start because someone didn’t desex their cat and just let them go.
"Even people who don’t like cats, we all have something in common, which is we agree that there are places that cats shouldn’t be.
"We don’t want those wild cats reproducing. They live terrible lives and they have kittens when they’re as young as 4 months old," she said.
"So if we can control that, then everybody’s happy."
