‘Cat laws’ in various forms are often purported as the secret to managing skyrocketing shelter populations. If only all the ‘irresponsible’ cat owners identified and desexed their cats … the thinking goes … we wouldn’t need shelters.
Cat laws are generally designed to do three things;
1. Increase rates of desexing, so there are less cats to enter shelters
2. Increase the rates of permanent identification, so more cats are reclaimed from shelters
and finally, (and most importantly in my mind)
3. See less cats killed in pounds, yay!
The NSW Companion Animals Act was passed in late 1998. For the last fifteen years, it has required;
– microchipping at ‘point of sale’ with kittens needing to be microchipped if sold or given away
– cats over 6 months of age to be lifetime registered (incentivising desexing with a lifetime registration fee of $150 for a non-desexed cat, which is discounted to $40 if the cat is desexed).
So, by law, all cats need to be microchipped before sale, and adult cats need to be lifetime registered.
While not the traditional ‘mandatory desexing’ favoured by many animal advocates, by offering a differential rate for the registration fee, the results seem to be extremely positive. The overwhelming majority of cats who are lifetime registered are desexed. A staggering 98%
This is an extraordinary level of compliance for desexing.
Kittens sold from pet shops must be microchipped by law. There are fines for any person who gives or sells a cat without first microchipping it, whether through newspapers or shop windows. Council pounds and rescue are also required to chip cats before sale. So any non-compliance is due to a lack of enforcement, not because of the lack of an applicable law.
Since the implementation of the laws, the reclaim rate for cats has tripled. Tripled! Amazeballs, I hear you say!
In 2001/02, 239 cats were reclaimed. In 2011/12 the reclaim rate was 731 cats. Which is definitely a positive increase, until you consider in the same 2011/12 year, nearly 25,000 cats were impounded. The reclaim rate was a deplorable 3%.
These laws don’t seem to be increasing the rates of microchipping amongst cats entering shelters, so are failing to increase reclaim rates.
Cats who are registered, are nearly universally desexed at 98%.But just 3% of impounds have a microchip that would indicate they are owned and that allows them to be reclaimed.How can there be such a huge discrepancy in these two numbers if ‘cat laws’ were an effective tool at decreasing shelter killing? |
The key to reduce killing – according to supporters of these kinds of laws – is to reduce intakes.
Certainly, the laws might take a few years to ‘work’, but eventually if effective, the rates of cats entering shelters should start to decline. With the high rate of desexing, plus new kittens being chipped, it should be just one or two ‘seasons’ of new cat aquisition, before all cats going into homes are chipped and desexed… that’s if the laws are working.
Here are the impoundment rates for cats in NSW pounds…
In 2001/02, three years after implementation, a little over 10,000 cats were impounded. That’s a lot of cats.
By 2011/12, fourteen years later, the impound rate has more than doubled, reaching around 25,000 cats.
It seems to have levelled out there, probably only limited by the capacity of the councils to trap, transport, hold and kill cats. If capacity were increased (more money was spent on ‘enforcement’, staff and bigger pounds) then certainly these numbers could go up.
By any measure, a doubling of cat intakes in pounds (an extra 15,000 cats a year) is not a ‘working’ cat management effort. Yet, compliance amongst cat owners seems to be high. Why then are we still seeing cat numbers surging?
All of the efforts in NSW are directed towards owned cats.
The efforts are designed to force each cat into a home. They use all resources to try and coerce people authorities believe to be a ‘cat owner’ into admitting they own a particular cat, and then send agents to their home to issue fines. And if they don’t comply, or deny ownership – BAM! they impound the cat and kill it.
We need to be asking ourselves is this the best use of our resources? Is impounding and killing cats really what we want to be spending our money on? Especially when, just last year, it failed and the cat ended up in the pound 25,000 times?
It is estimated that it costs between $150 and $250 for a pound to identify, trap, transport, hold, feed, vet assess and usually kill, an individual cat. That means we spend between $3,000,000 and $6,000,000 annually in NSW alone on a system which nearly always ends up with the cat’s death.
All while the number of cats being impounded annually continues to grow.
Advocates for these laws will purport ‘a lack of enforcement’ for the lack of success – except that ‘enforcement’ in this instance, usually ends up with the cat entering the pound system…. so it is being enforced quite a lot (about 25,000 times a year).
They’ll also say the community needs ‘more support services’ for the laws to bring about positive change – except that the millions which could have been being invested in these programs, is being pissed away paying rangers to kill cats.
At $200 a pop, that money could desex up to 30,000 cats a year. Over fifteen years, that’s 450,000 cats who we could have desexed. Instead we spent that money impounding and killing them
Cat laws are not free – they are enormously expensive. And largely, as we see here in NSW, they are an absolute waste of valuable funds.
Advocates may also say we need even more laws – showing that they’re either ignorant and don’t understand that ‘enforcement’ generally means impounding cats, and rarely means successfully prosecuting an owner…
…. or that they have a vested interest in impounding cats, being a high-volume shelter being paid by councils to collect these animals off the street and seizing them from non-compliant owners. The terrible truth is there is millions of dollars in pound contracts available to shelters willing to process cats on behalf of councils, so there is little motivation to advocate for anything other than expanding powers to bring cats in.
The truth is, whether a cat is owned or not, the answer is the same. We need to keep that cat out of the shelter.
If a cat hasn’t been to the vet, been desexed or registered… why are we so hung up on whether it has an owner or not? Surely the way we need to process it is the same?
Get it desexed. Return it back to its home, either as a communal cat on an urban street, or as an unowned stray.
The reason targeted desexing programs work is because they keep cats out of shelters, rather than work to bring them in.
Identify cats – owned and unowned, who would not be desexed otherwise, and get in there and get it done. Spend your resources on actually helping cats, rather than paying enforcement staff, writing fines and building bigger pounds.
Fifteen years of failure and waste is an appalling misuse of the community’s resources. The only thing that will be worse is fifteen years and one day – except I suspect come twenty years and we’ll still see cat groups fiddling with laws and cashing in on killing.
See also: Oops! Everything we know about cat management is wrong
I agree, desexing is the way to go to keep the cats out of the shelter. And I understand regarding the unowned desexing – communal cats etc – getting it desexed and returning it to its home. But how do you go about identifying the ‘owned cats’ that would not be desexed otherwise, and get in there and get it done?