October 28, 2009Comments are closed.cats, TAS Cat Laws
When a the heavy pendulum of the law swings too far in one direction, it can’t do so without causing extreme repercussions to the community. Announced in the Mercury today, Australia’s most anti-cat legislation to date.
All domestic cats in Tasmania will have to be microchipped and desexed under new laws tabled in Parliament yesterday.
The contentious Cat Management Bill 2009 requires that the owners of Tasmania’s estimated 92,000 pet cats compulsorily microchip and desex them if they are older than six months.
Only registered breeders of pedigree cats will not be required to spay or desex their animals.
No cats or kittens will be able to be advertised or legally sold until they are at least eight weeks old and have been neutered and microchipped to individually identify each cat and its owner.
The fine for selling a cat that has not been neutered will be as high as $6000, while owners of cats without identification microchips implanted under their skin will face a $2400 penalty.
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The draconian new legislation also proposes that any cat left unclaimed by its owners at a cat management facility such as a council pound or the Hobart Cat Centre for more than five days can be euthanased without its owner’s permission.Local councils, Forestry Tasmania and the Environment Department also will be able to declare any area of land such as a council park, reserve or national park as a prohibited cat zone where any cat can be legally trapped, seized and humanely destroyed.
Farmers also will be able to destroy any cat caught on their property if it is found more than one kilometre from any nearby homes.
The new laws, which are likely to be passed by both houses of Parliament before December, are designed to control the estimated 150,000 feral and stray cats living across the state.
The aim is to limit environmental devastation caused by feral cats that eat Tasmania’s unique small native animals in the wild, threatening the survival of some species.
The laws follow a discussion paper released by the Government last August about the best way to introduce new controls on pet cats. Much of the legislation focuses on who can kill unwanted cats, how they are to be killed humanely and limiting the timeframe over which owners can claim a stray or lost cat.
Currently animal welfare centres in Tasmania such as the Hobart Cat Centre and RSPCA homes in Launceston and the North-West of the state euthanase more than 40 cats a week as stray and feral feline numbers continue to escalate.
The Hobart Cat Centre last year received 2500 unwanted cats and of these 20 per cent went to new homes. The rest were put down.
The draft cat management legislation was tabled in Parliament yesterday by Primary Industries Minister David Llewellyn. It has the broad support of the Greens and the Liberals and is expected to be debated and passed in the Lower House next week.
But Liberal primary industries spokesman Rene Hidding said he still had concerns about the lack of additional funding to accompany the Bill.
The Mercury
If you were to design legislation to pander to a cat hater, you couldn’t do much better than this; compulsory desexing and microchipping, increased powers for animal services to impound, shorter impound times before cats can be killed and the ability for cats found away from home to be trapped and destroyed.
Despite the fact that ‘cat welfare’ groups are already killing 4 out of 5 of the cats they take in, they’ve lobbied to be given more power seize and impound cats who are not sterilised and microchipped. Diverting resources from programs which save lives, they are proposing more comprehensive registration systems, more fines written, more officers, more stray animal collections and more animals killed.
Instead of legislating to protect these pets from harm, these groups are looking to expand the public’s right to trap and kill strays and reduce owners claim over lost pets. They are working to give any cat-hating thugs a free pass when it comes to killing pets who may or may not have owners. How can they possibly reconcile this contradiction with their claimed mission of ‘lobbying for the humane treatment of animals’?
While rolling out increasing powers of the catch and kill bureaucracy; absolute no resources are being directed towards initiatives that support owners. Ignoring data which has shown time and time again that free and cheap desexing clinics lead to increased community compliance and international recommendations that people who fall below a certain level of income should be given a ‘free desexing’ voucher in lieu of a fine (eg. anyone on any type of income support, or pension should be given support, not have their pet targeted for impoundment), this state is bringing in legislation while doing precious little to actually promote desexing or save lives.
Animal activists who have supported this legislation need to spend some time considering where these laws are about to take them – head first into making 2010 the worst year for cat killing ever seen in the state. While defending poorly performing shelters, they’ve lobbied to boost intakes and alienate and threaten cats and their owners, by supporting legislation that will virtually guarantee the death of thousands of animals.
Shelters exist to be a safety net for animals. The fact they’re lobbying to increase their powers to kill, speaks of a lack of ethics and a defeatist mentality grounded in killing. While shelters tell people not to treat animals as disposable, they themselves refuse to implement the programs that would save their lives. Most people find killing abhorrent. Most people will do the right thing if given support and the right information. Most people aren’t only not the problem, but are part of the solution. Laws targeting owners focus the blame in the wrong direction and seek only to offer political cover for a broken animal welfare system which fails to protect pets.
It has, every so often, occurred to me that our default assumption, that anyone involved in animal welfare, from government bodies to pounds, must be on the side of the animals, no matter in what misguided way, is probably not entirely correct. I suspect that a percentage have no interest or empathy for animals and simply see them as a problem which can be legislated away. I also suspect that a, hopefully vanishingly small percentage, are outright sociopaths who enjoy the power of being able to kill things.
Yup agree completely.
And it’s doubly misleading when initiatives driven by a desire to punish pet owners are done so under the guise of ‘improving animal welfare’, such is usually the case with these kinds of programs. At least no one in this article came out and said “it will mean we don’t have to kill so many cats” because that kind of bizarre illogical thinking tends to run deep in these circles.
Interesting is this post from KC Dog blog from the Best Friends No More Homeless Pets Conference in the US:
Its a shame we have to follow the mistakes of others, before we realise what they already know….
I am a cat rescuer and I agree with compulsory microchipping and desexing. How is that going to hurt the animal?
I do not agree with shorter impound times as sometimes a cat can disappear and a person may not go looking for it for a few days.
I agree cats cause havoc with wildlife and cats should be contained within an owner’s property. That is called responsible cat ownership as far as I see it. Although a cat owner loves cats, his/her next door neighbour may not – and they have their rights too.
By compulsory desexing at least the breeding cycle can stop for one cat and hopefully if more get desexed it will lessen the amount of cats that don’t make it out of the pounds. There are far far too many being put to sleep – this shouldn’t happen if people were responsible.
Unfortunately it looks like there are many people that are not responsible cat owners and that is why the law gets tougher. If people did the right thing then no doubt such heavy handed legislation would not need to be put in place.
Your argument is based on two mistruths held dear by rescue;
– people are irresponsible and that’s why they don’t desex
and
– the more we can force people to desex their cats, the less we have to kill in rescue
Lets look at the first one;
People are irresponsible and that’s why they don’t desex
When research is done on the owned cat population, it finds a 90% or higher desexed rate: QLD reported 93.5%, Sydney reported 97.3%. There have been dozens of these studies in association with researching these kinds of piece of legislation; The National People and Pets Survey 2006 which aimed to get national data found
Both the RSPCA and the AVA put the figure at between 90% – 95% desexed.
There is not an enormous percentage of the population who aren’t desexing their cats. There just simply isn’t.
So that last amount; that 5-10%… who are they?
Let assume they are ‘irresponsible owners’; we say “desex your cat, it’s the law”. And they say “here, take the cat”… because that’s what ‘irresponsible’ people do.
So the result = more impoundments, not less.
Lets say they’re not; lets say these are people who are genuinely disadvantaged, poor, elderly or with a mental illness or some other hurdle to being normal participants in society. We say “desex your cat, it’s the law”. And they say “I can’t afford it”. And now we write them a fine and impound their cat.
Also here, the result = more impoundments, not less.
Make no mistake, the result of compulsory desexing is more impoundments, not less. And with a shelter system which nationally kills upwards of 80% of the cats it takes in, the last thing that any person concerned about cat welfare should advocate for, is giving animal welfare groups more powers to impound cats.
So whats the answer for both of these types of owners? Free cat desexing. Give it to the ‘irresponsible’ people free, because they will not do it otherwise; and keep those cats in their homes. Give it to the ‘disadvantaged’ people free, because they can’t afford it; and keep those cats in their homes too.
…. Right second point.
– the more we can force people to desex their cats, the less we have to kill in rescue
Given we’ve just established that the overwhelming majority of people are already desexing their cats, how do their cats contribute to the cat overpopulation problem? Well in short, they don’t.
Michael Hayward of the Australian Veterinary Association and Centre for Companion Animals in the Community, spoke at last year’s AIAM Conference and points out what would seem like the bleedin’ obvious;
So the cats that are breeding aren’t owned, have likely never been owned, and will thumb their noses at your law because… well they’re cats. Law or no law, they’ll keep doing that thing they do.
….
Certainly, now might be the point where you go: well yes, but people should be able to live without the annoyance of free-roaming cats, lets round them up and kill them all. And hey, if you believe that a cats life is worth less than someones right to live without a minor annoyance, then certainly by all means keep pushing that righteous barrow. But I personally believe that a good community puts up with a lot of minor transgressions of the others who share that community; kids bouncing balls, dogs barking, the occasional late running party, early morning lawnmowing, the squawking of a few chickens or a cockatoo…
Those things and the acceptance of those things is what makes a community, a community. A group of people all bitching about the minor problems they face in living together and constantly involving the authorities is certainly not the kind of place where I’d want to live.
As animal lovers, we need to advocate for these cats. They share our lives and our communities. Whether they’re owned animals, or orphans they deserve the right to live out their days free from harassment. People who give a stray cat a little bit of food, should be praised for being compassionate and encouraged to visit our free desexing clinics. Not hounded and fined for having an ‘undesexed’ cat. And being an orphan doesn’t have to be forever; anyone who’s been adopted by a stray can vouch for that.
We gotta stop blaming our communities. They are the answer not the problem.