No really, it’s not ‘irresponsible’ owners
February 11, 2009Comments are closed.cats
A huge thanks to Tim from i-Pet Blog for flagging this report;
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A study has been published by a team from Sydney University on cat ownership in metropolitan Sydney.
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A random survey of over 2700 homes collected some interesting statistics:
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- 33% of households had one or more cats
- of the cat owning households, 76% had only one cat, and 19% had two cats
- there were more female cats (55%) than male cats (45%)
- the average age for a cat was 7 years
- 97.3% of cats were desexed
- Crossbred cats (moggies) outnumbered pedigree cats by a ratio of 3.3:1
- The Burmese was the most common pure-bred breed, followed by the Persian
- Only 5.8% of cats had never visited a veterinarian
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More detailed statistics are available in the article, published in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery (2009). Click this link to go to the article: 
doi:10.1016/j.jfms.2008.06.010
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The next time you hear some rescue group blathering on about needing to ‘legislate against irresponsible owners to reduce cat overpopulation’ realise that they’re spouting complete and utter bulldust. 9.7 out of every 10 owned cats are desexed. Instead we need to work on the thousands of other breeding cats, who will never have a real owner, and no ‘people punishment’ in the universe is a solution for them – we just gotta get desexing.
This report also shows an opportunity; why do all these people have only one cat? What can we do to get them to adopt another?
How interesting – their figures are virtually identical to those from the Southampton Cat study (doi:10.1016/S0168-1591(99)00086-6)
“The most comprehensive of these surveys was carried out in a 50 ha area in the Shirley area of Southampton (UK). Householders were interviewed from 949 (80.8%) of the 1175 residences in the area. This revealed a population of 315 cats, of which 21 were pedigrees (and were excluded from further analysis) and 294 were mongrels. Overall neutering rates were very high: 96.8% of adult males and 98.7% of adult females were neutered. The oldest cats in the survey had been born 18 years previously, so it was possible to examine trends in neutering over this time period. However, many females were allowed to reproduce before being neutered, so a more informative analysis came from relating lifetime fecundity (mediated by neutering) to year of birth. Mean lifetime fecundity could be calculated for each cohort where all the females had ultimately been neutered. The regression (Fig. 1) shows a dramatic decline in the mean number of litters born per female, from over 0.6 in 1978 to 0.12 in 1991–1992. With a measured median litter size of 4, 0.5 litters/female are needed to keep the population size constant; increasing neutering has meant that the cats in the Shirley survey area fell below this level of fecundity in the early 1980s. In 1994, owned cats in the area could only produce sufficient kittens to maintain the population at approximately 25% of its present level.”
It would be very interesting to get a third set of figures from the US.