Behind Every Good Whisky Is a Trusty Distillery Cat

For example, when you leave a group of toddlers alone for a few days, you don't end up with an entirely new batch of toddlers two months later. That right there changes the dynamic of the issue pretty seriously, and you're just hand-waving that away.

Granting cats and dogs the rights of toddlers or autistic individuals means you're giving up the right to spay or neuter your pet; nobody would advocate for sterilizing a toddler, but many very reasonable people advocate for sterilizing house pets, and for good reasons.

This is an incoherent analogy brought about by anthropomorphizing non-human creatures, and were it followed through on it would do immeasurable harm to the very creatures you wish to protect. To take the example of pills versus spaying/neutering (so, in your analogy, these hordes of toddlers can reproduce), you assume that their owners would universally be responsible enough to and capable of administering the pill, and that those who were not sufficiently responsible would do something other than abandon the animal when it began menstruating (in the case of a female dog or cat) or behaving in a sexually aggressive manner (in the case of a male).

Then you assert that giving them "rights" would induce people to behave well, presumably under the threat of punishment. This might actually result in a similar situation to toddlers -- forbidden to leave the house or go out of sight of their owners, forbidden to play in potentially dangerous situations, and a variety of other consequences that would be terrible for cats or dogs because they are not human and to treat them equivalently is cruel to the animal.

I want to make sure I'm clear on your proposal before I address it.

Edit: Your edit indicates that yes, I have your position correct. I would submit that we don't do that because it's untenable to round up every stray animal (or even any particular stray animal) and administer a birth control pill every single day. It has very little to do with cost (except in the sense that to implement such a plan would be incredibly, prohibitively expensive) and very much to do with practicality; it is far easier and far more effective to spay or neuter an animal once and then release them back to where they were than to track down, catch, administer pills that risk being ineffective if you miss a dose, and then release again, every day for the duration of the animal's life post sexual maturity.

Sure, they are not forced. But then again, it's (rightfully) illegal to force them to take long term birth control injections as well. What makes the sterilization so terrible compared to that?

And even the scenario you presented here is hardly the summary execution that you listed as a fact previously; can you address that discrepancy?