December 7, 2009Comments are closed.cats
It’s a shame that animal welfare groups can’t stop walking blindly into the same old mistakes again and again.
Once more with feeling; compulsory registration (and desexing and microchipping) is too expensive to actually enforce and only serves to enrage and empower cat haters into anti-cat behaviour.
Spike in traps after cat registration
Demand for cat traps has soared since the start of compulsory cat registration as residents take animal control into their own hands.
The upsurge comes as one southeast Queensland council admits it only ever expects half of all cat owners to register their pets, compared to about 80 per cent of dog owners.
Ipswich councillor Andrew Antoniolli, who is in charge of animal issues in the city west of Brisbane, said council would be hard-pressed to get more than 50 per cent of cat owners to register their cats with the council.
Local Government Association of Queensland executive director Greg Hallam said councils were relying on promoting their cat-registration schemes rather than costly enforcement activities. ref
If you’re an animal welfare advocate that thinks a law that makes a cat without an owner a target, somehow ‘protects cats’, then you’re simply wrong. These laws encourage cat abuse.
If you’re a local council representative who thinks a law that allows people to target cats they don’t own, will somehow reduce the number of cat related complaints you’re going to receive, then you’re simply wrong. Take the number of complaints you get now and double them, since now the distraught owner who finds out the local shelter killed their cat after their angry neighbour trapped it is going to be calling you too.
As cat welfare advocates we need to be championing laws designed to protect cats. From animal abusers, from vengeful neighbourhood cat vigilantes and from pounds and shelters themselves. Things are set to get much worse if we don’t.
Hi. I appreciate your concerns and the opportunity to comment. If you would like to contact me to talk direct pls feel free to do so (number removed). These laws, introduced by the State Govt and enforced by local councils will take a few years for the benefits to emerge, however, having said that and whilst there has been a spike in requests for cat traps and perhaps impoundements of cats, there has also been an increase in the percentage of claimed cats from the pound. This is reassuring.
Regardless of some views, legislation was required to address the social failing of the public to address the unacceptable level of destruction of unwanted cats and dogs. Particularly with respect to the cats, the percentage of unclaimed (and in many cases, destryed cats) equals or is greater than 95%. This is unacceptable.
I believe I am proactive in animal welfare and I believe that regulation has a role in improving responsible pet ownership and animal welfare.
Ipswich City Council has adopted an affordable cat rego scheme and this seems to be having a far better outcome than some of our other SEQ councils.
Despite your views on registration, it is a tool (or a means) to an end. It has worked well with dog owners and with a bit of tweaking can work well with cat owners.
I would love to discuss this further with you as I too have investigated this matter, without and pre-conceived views and would welcome the opportunity to discuss it further with you and hear your views.
Cat Alliance of Australia Ltd has a “eradication of cat traps” program going. We believe 99% of cats caught in cat traps are owned by low social economic or old aged people who can’t afford to get their cats out of animal welfare and most haven’t even heard of animal welfare groups. Mostly this is devastating to those people and are their only contact with the outside. Education by the councils and welfare groups should be everyones main aim and TNR it doesn’t take einstein to tell you what they have been doing over the last 40 years does not work. Take a leaf out of america who have no transgressed to non-kill and TNR. Our website is http://www.catallianceaustralia.org
Hi Andrew,
Thanks so much for stopping by!
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against a cat registration program. I think responsible cat owners having the ability to register their cat’s details with their local council is an excellent idea. Cats should be afforded the same protection once entering the pound system as dogs, and a registration program is an enormous part of this.
The objection I have is that rather than use it as a way to protect owned animals, it’s being used as a way to target unowned ones. And that while these pounds and shelters are euthanasing 95% of cats they impound, they have been given even more powers to collect unregistered animals, under the false premise that ‘irresponsible people’ are to blame for cat overpopulation.
The idea that it is a ‘social failing’ causing cats to breed ignores every single bit of data ever recorded in Australia. A study of 25,000 cat admissions into Melbourne shelters showed 80% of cats impounded had never had an owner, a survey in Sydney of 2,700 cat owners showed 97.3% were already desexed. Queensland has more breeding cats than any other state, not because of some epidemic of irresponsibility not seen in other states, but simply because it’s really warm and newborn kittens live long and prosper, rather than expire soon after birth.
Compulsory registration does have some effects; unfortunately all lead to more impoundments, which, when we’re killing the ones we’re already impounding, seems counter intuative to the idea that we’re aiming to ‘reduce euthanasia’;
– People who don’t like cats, feel empowered to trap them
– Semi-owners (people who are kind enough to give a cat a little food) feel obligated to turn in their stray
– People who have cats living around their property, but whom are truly ‘irresponsible’, when challenged by animal control… will simply hand over their cats
These are bad laws, not because they’re not implemented with good intentions but simply because they’re going after the wrong fall guy. To quote another blogger; to target owners in the fight against cat overpopulation is like targeting rabbit owners in an effort to stem wild rabbit numbers.
And those ‘irresponsible’ owners we’re targeting? They aren’t an epidemic, they’re an anomaly. Often they’re also mentally ill, elderly or somehow disadvantaged and disconnected from society. A survey in the US showed the biggest hurdle to compliance to cat desexing is cost. These people aren’t evil – they’re poor.
This kind of ‘big stick’ approach takes us further from the things that actually could start to bring down shelter kill rates. All because we’re following the same wrong-thinking thats been pushed for decades without success.
We love compulsory registration because it sounds like a good idea. It especially sounds like a good idea to councils – cat lovers will love you, believing it will protect their cat and cat haters will love you because they can see the council is doing something about cats.
But it doesn’t work. It’s never worked. Not here. Not anywhere. Not in any other country in the world. There are no stats to show any drop in cat numbers or cat complaints or cat euthanasia by compulsory registration – what you do get is thousands of dead cats and the same cat problem you had before.
Creating this type of legislation may make a council feel good, but it does nothing for the issue regardless of if you are a cat lover or a cat hater.
What does work? low cost and free desexing for any cat (owned or not) and TNR programs. It may not make you popular, but if you can be brave enough to look at the research, look at the case studies and act decisively, you may actually make difference.
In the mid 1990s in Victoria, the large animal welfare organisations lobbied the relevant state government people and it became a legal requirement to register cats. A decade and a bit later, nothing is any better than it was back then. It simply didn’t work.
At the time, the community were told that this would “fix” the unwanted cat problem. BUT…. Cat registration peaked at around 40% of owned cats and stayed at that level. Meanwhile, desexing – a voluntary procedure in the 1990s – was up around the 90% mark. But I digress.
Clearly it is in the interests of regulators to “do something” and in this case, Mr Antoniolli can claim a big win. And saying it is “too early” to see an improvement is a sound strategy for hosing the critics down. Forgive me for being a cynic, but we’re still waiting for the “fix” in Victoria nearly 15 years after the introduction of cat registration.
And while the Cat Protection Society and Lost Dogs Home continue to do the job of a council pound and take in more and more of Melbourne’s homeless dogs and cats (and take in income from many of Melbourne’s local councils), whilst claiming to be animal welfare shelters (not pounds), what hope have we got of the “fix” ever coming.
(Stop and think about this – when your income comes from the councils… and your income is linked to the quantity of animals you manage from those councils… isn’t there a conflict of interest in advocating laws that actually INCREASE shelter through-put? Laws like registration? Curfew? Mandatory desexing? Isn’t it like McDonalds lobbying for a law for more fast-food consumption? )
Meanwhile, politicians may silence the animal welfare lobbyists, but they won’t silence the mews and yelps of dying cats and dogs. Such a loss.