RSPCA ACT has used Facebook to blast for foster carers ahead of kitten season (smart! smart! smart!)
Do you want to help save lives?
We are gearing up for summer: We are on the look out for people wanting to help us with our kitten foster care program. We fill up pretty quickly and to have homes in our community for four to six weeks means we save more lives. We supply pretty much everything, you supply the love and socialisation. Give us a call on 6287 8100 and ask about our kitten foster care program.
After the Bligh Government’s cat registration scheme was branded a “bumbled effort” and with the program expected to cost $1.1 million over three years, Queensland councils were not happy:
Community and cultural development chairman Bob La Castra said he was disappointed the council always had to ‘pick up the State Government’s mess’.
“This is what they always do, they bring in the legislation and then throw it in our laps,” said Cr La Castra.
“If they want us to enforce their law they should throw us some money for the costs.”
So unhappy in fact, that they chose not to promote the program. Whups!
Cat owners have been granted a 12-month grace period to register their pets because the Gold Coast City Council and State Government decided to keep them in the dark about the new laws instead of spending money on a public awareness campaign.
And it’s not just QLD having cat law problems.
Hopefully this will sit with the pollies for a long, long, long time. Time enough for the advocates for this ridiculous legislation to come to their senses and start pushing things that actually work, like cheap and free desexing.
Speaking of things that work, Nathan Winograd has blogged about his visit to Australia and mirrored our thoughts, that first half of the NDN (the bit where all the councils got to speak) was *headdeskingly* traditional;
(shelter directors across Australia) were surveyed about their attitudes to the No Kill philosophy and its achievability. The excuses were similar to those offered in the United States:
– We need tougher laws to make people responsible
– The animals are better off dead than adopted into low quality homes
– There are too many animals, not enough homes
– You can’t adopt your way out of killing
– Not enough funding to save more lives
– No Kill is not achievable
– Any criticism of shelters is unfair because they’re doing the public’s dirty work
– What works in the US will no necessarily work in Australia
Why are these excuses and not true barriers to success? To begin with, they have been proven false in the US context. And the United States and Australia share many similarities. Both are killing roughly half of all impounded animals. Both have almost identical rates of pet ownership. Adjusted for population, both are killing roughly the same number of animals. And Australian pet owners are spending slightly higher per capita on their animals than their American counterparts. In fact, like the American experience, spending on dogs and cats in Australia continues to grow, even as nearly all other sectors of the economy are in steep decline.
Moreover, recent studies in Australia show that the number of Australia’s every year who get a new pet, outpace the number killed annually in Australian pounds and shelters; As many as 1,000,000 Australians seek a new dog or cat every year; while roughly 400,000 are being killed annually. Like the United States, the real issue is not an overpopulation of dogs and cats – the thriving pet store trade contradicts this assertion – but market share borne of failure on the parts of shelters and pounds to compete with commercial sources of animals.
The number of times Hugh Wirth was quoted calling pit bulls ‘timebombs’ on online news websites? 32
The number of times the Lynn Bradshaw President of the RSPCA was quoted as saying Hugh Wirth is a silly old duffer is wrong and we should be banning deed not breed? 2
Boo Australian media – BOOOO!
