It’s easy to get caught in the hype of mandatory desexing; what we’ll do is bring in a law, that will make all the irresponsible owners desex their cats, and volia! problem solved.
And it seems like a good deal. Even falling within how laws should be designed. Cultural change takes place (eg. we all decide that driving fast is bad thing) and then we bring in a law that means you have to comply, to pick up the stragglers who won’t do it voluntarily (slow down, or we’ll take your licence).
But the difference with cats is this. It’s not like when you threaten to take someone’s licence and cause major inconvenience to their lifestyle. If you are targeting a person who obviously doesn’t care about the welfare of their cat, what are you going to threaten them with? Taking their cat? Here, have it. Fining them? I’ve never seen that cat before in my life, take it.
So what you’re really lobbying for isn’t making all the irresponsible owners desex their cats, but taking the cats off anyone who can’t, or won’t desex them.
And running contrary to claim of offering the community less killing, driving up intakes.
But the law, in truth, isn’t enacted that way. Short of lifting the tail of every tom and peering in the ear of every puss, there is no way to check the desexed status of even a small perentage of the cat population – the man power is simply too enormous. So this is what they do.
They make it so you can’t register an undesexed cat.
And all those people who don’t really care to desex their cat, really couldn’t care less whether it’s registered either. Which, as you can imagine works well to do absolutely nothing at all.
But it’s not all good news. There are some that do get effected by this legislation;
Poor people. A law which directs you to do something you can’t afford, doesn’t help you afford it. So their cats are targeted.
The cats of people who don’t care. They definitely get caught in this legislation. Without an owner who protects them, they’re impounded by neighbours, animal control or simply handed over when the legislation is enacted.
And cats without owners. No one cares about them and they fall under the catergory ‘vermin’ in most Australian legislation.
So rather than:
Mandatory legislation that makes irresponsible people desex their cats.
What we’re really advocating for is:
Mandatory desexing that makes irresponsible owners do nothing at all, impounds poor people’s cats and makes unowned cats a target for removal.
Just a reminder, that the groups advocating for this are working in cat protection.
Irony alert.
The sort of logic visualized seems to be that once the law comes in, over the next little while, say a few years, the problem of unwanted cats goes away. Gets resolved all by itself because all those people just HAVE to comply. Then the colonies living in the shadows of satellite shopping centres and drains and laneways and under people’s houses just somehow, by proxy, either get desexed or disappear.
What did we hear today from a tradesman? He goes to pick his daughter up from work at night. She works in a restaurant in a group of shops with MacDonalds on the premises. He sits in the car to wait and sees the cats come out across the carpark, but they run when they see anyone.
He sees mother cats being trailed by kittens.
Absolutely sickening. Doomed for an early death. Now, how is this going to be resolved by mandatory bloody desexing?
The thinking goes that these are dumped cats and MD will stop it. Huh??