The crew from Mr Fishy* cat food are a bunch of genuine cat lovers. Their young team really liked the idea of the ‘Secret Cat’ campaign; the fact it is positive and trying to sexy up free-roaming cats, rather than paint them as a pest.
They approached us to see if they could donate free food to Secret Cat carers, or if there was any way they could support an initiative that helped these cats somehow. The alignment was perfect, as I would hazard a guess that 95% of Secret Cats are already being fed Mr Fishy cat food. Except…
As I blogged earlier in the week, cat groups are lobbying hard for mandatory desexing, but rather than be implemented how they say it will; by making irresponsible people desex their cats, it’s actually enacted like this; by making it impossible to register an undesexed cat.
But what does this have to do with cat food donations?
Anyone who’s worked with a large corporate entity will know, they must have all their legal i’s dotted and t’s crossed. What the groups lobbying for mandatory desexing don’t mention, is that while it’s quite easy to get a council to bring in a law that allows them more powers to round up and kill stray animals (after all, they’ve been doing it since local government was invented), we’re still decades away from having exclusions brought in for free-roaming cats. Years of telling people they’re vermin, can’t be changed overnight.
If you’ve implemented mandatory desexing, then each cat has to be registered by three or six months old. In the case of Secret Cats, that’s not likely to happen. Colony or community cats, even if desexed, generally aren’t owned by one person so aren’t registered. So anyone who cares for them effectively breaks the law. This cat food company could not sponsor something illegal, so their support which could have done so much good to the semi-owned cats of Australia, is unavailable.
There are community groups offering programs doing cost effective, outreach desexing. One recently receiving attention was the Cats Assistance To Sterilise (CATS) program in Mitcham, South Australia, which put forward an alternative motion to the Council’s $252,000 dollar cat control campaign that require all cats in the shire be registered:
Ms Weaver also proposed an alternate solution – a two-year trial program in association with a community group, Cats Assistance To Sterilise (CATS), which would see subsidised or free desexing at no cost to the council.
“Ninety-five per cent of the prolem is desexing… the bylaw does not address desxing. Here we have an organisation working with 12 of the 18 metro councils successfully, desexing cats for very little cost.” Ms Weaver said. “Burnside, Unley, Norwood Payneham & St Peters all support it.
CATS president Christine Pierson said the council was making a huge mistake with the bylaw.
“The council has totally ignored the scientific fact that have been presented that the bylaw will not reduce cat numbers and will not reduce cat-related problems,” she said.
Unfortunately, CATS, who were already working out the community saving lives through targeted desexing are now facing the same problem that everyone in the country is facing, thanks to the animal welfare groups driving these laws:
If a cat doesn’t have an owner and you desex and release it, you are breaking the law.
You can’t feed, care for, shelter, desex or provide medical care for a cat without an owner, in a council area with mandatory registration. Because the minute you show an animal any care at all, under these laws it’s your animal. If you then don’t register it, or you release it then you’ve ‘abandoned’ it. If you’re unlucky you could be prosecuted. If you’re ‘lucky’, they’ll simply seize the cat and kill it.
This is the simple reason why there aren’t hundreds of privately sponsored desexing vans crossing the country desexing cats. I know this because I’ve worked to try and get two of them off the ground and even if they’re up and running, they’re doing so in a legal limbo; working knowing full well it’s not 100 percent legit. Which makes getting private sponsorship (ala Mr Fishy*, with hundreds of thousands of dollars they’d be willing to hand over for simple splash signage on the side of the van) nearly impossible.
When I asked my Twitter feed “What are mandatory desexing advocates lobbying for really?”
I got back this reply: “Much less euthanasia”
Which is wrong.
If this was really about “much less euthanasia”, these groups would be lobbying for:
– Free and low cost community desexing clinics
If Mitcham can spend $252,000 on a five year cat registration program, in a City with just over 60,000 residents, imagine what they could have done if they’d instead taken the $4 from every single tax payer and sunk it into a cat desexing program.
– Protection from impoundment, for community cats
A cat welfare group, should by definition, be lobbying for things that improve cat welfare. Laws which target semi-owned and feral cats for impoundment, when you know full well cats that aren’t human friendly are nearly always killed, is not in any way improving their welfare. Dead is not better than free-roaming. We don’t suggest for one moment a possum is better off dead than living outside, so why would cats deserve any less respect?
– Protection from prosecution for community cat carers
Someone who feeds and cares for a community cat, makes that cats life better. Why would you then punish that person? A law which demands every cat is registered, puts community cat carers at risk. It stifles community cat desexing programs and makes free-roaming cats a target for impoundment. Demanding people surrender their community cat does not lead to less euthanasia.
If this were really about reducing euthanasia; then mandatory desexing advocates themselves would be out in the community, desexing as many cats as they can and asking the government to support them. They would be building desexing vans to help cat carers and low income families. They would be asking people to desex their community cat and keep caring for them, rather than impounding it. And they would be lobbying government to protect these cats from harm.
What they are actually doing is spittle-spewing, rather than helping. Criticising, rather than supporting and killing rather than doing those things that could stop it.
Mandatory desexing is simply a lazy way to look like they care for cat welfare, not about reducing killing.
*Not their real name.
Shel – you’re forgetting that most stray cats live a miserable life. They might get cat ‘flu you know. Native animals, like possums, never get run over, injured or diseased…. ‘cos they’re, like, native. So we should just kill those cats. It’s better.
And stray cats are absolutely decimating the pristine wilderness of the suburbs. We all know that if it weren’t for stray cats the platypus would return to the fetid waters of every river and creek in Australian cities. Within minutes of the last stray cat dying, there would be a plague of platypi.
Can the Mr. Fishy Catfood company donate their food to ‘registered’ no kill rescue shelters and organisations who can then distribute that food amongst those rescuers and feeders/carers, thereby getting around that situation of legality?
Mandatory desexing and registration also carries with it a number of concerns. When we approached the council a few years back about gathering a support group of volunteers to help with the cat problem and said how we had been involved in trapping and desexing, the council officer replied by asking which vet we had used.
Is this to be one of the steps? outlaw the desexing of an unregistered cat by imposing laws to tie the hands of the vets?
Restrictive laws only drive people underground. There are networks of people breaking these laws. Some just feed the cats out of kindness and then get faced by an exploding population which they can no longer control,many of these being low income people.
However, there are many sophisticated groups who combine resources and trap/spay/neuter. So you would think that councils would want to know these people. No, they don’t.
And if you have to have registration and limits are put upon how many you can own, how can people have two registered cats (as in Victoria) and two secret cats? They can’t avail themselves of low cost desexing in response to the WFC campaign because they ‘have too many’.
I only wish that councils would put the desexing campaigns above the registration campaigns.
What do mobs of Platypi eat JT? Perhaps we should be doing tnr with them?