That's not what puts off people from adopting. What puts them off is that they want the perfect, convenient, good-looking, cheapest option.

It's like saying that people don't adopt kids because they don't feel perfect enough; no, they don't do it because there's an easier, cheaper alternative, where they don't have to prove that they are good enough to take care of a kid beforehand. And that's why they just keep on popping kids in an overpopulated world.

You don't have to be perfect, but not making a social animal spend most of the day alone is a basic requirement.

On top of that, if you have the money to adopt and take care of a cat, but not the possibility of taking care of them properly, nothing prevents you from using this money to support a shelter or equivalent, which will in the end also take in stray cats.

But people don't want that because they care about themselves first, and want to get something from it first. They want a pet, and then they'll think about their wellbeing later, if it's not too inconvenient. And that's the mentality that leads to stray cats, dogs, and whatnot.

People don't have pets to help innocent creatures. They have pets to have a nice company that depends on them and will make them feel good after a long day of work, and they don't really care about anything else. As long as you don't change that, that's how you get people that get annoyed with their dogs and drop them on the side of the road, because they just don't get as much benefit from it as before.

Tldr: as long as you treat animals carelessly, people will be careless about them.

I really like people trying to be smart here by showing they don't give a shit about their pets.

If you can't have more than one pet, and cannot be most of the day with him, then yeah, don't get a pet. Just like you shouldn't have a kid if you spend 12+ hours per day away from them. That's basic, common sense.

The fact that you don't care about animal well-being, not even of your own pets that are depending fully on you, isn't something that you should be sassy about.

Maybe ask yourself why you felt the need to defend animal abuse, no?