March 31, 2010Comments are closed.cats, mandatory desexing
I’ve been asked by the Cat Protection Society to review the document that’s driving a lot of the cat welfare law changes in Victoria.
The document ‘The Cat Crisis Coalition – who are we, what do we want and why‘ is used as a handout for councils and the public to show just exactly why legislation should be enacted that require all cats over the age of 12 weeks to be desexed and that all cats and kittens are desexed before sale.
Remembering that 10,000 word documents about cat welfare are as about as interesting as navel lint to the public and the politicians who need to read them, I’m pleased to have the opportunity to break down into layman’s terms the claims of this paper.
Lets start with their first idea:
No one can deny we have a cat breeding problem in Australia. We certainly have a shelter overpopulation problem. But as Kersti Seksel said so eloquently at a recent cat welfare conference;
There’s no evidence that owned cats replenish the unowned population. It is more likely that the net movement is in the other direction, due to the differential desexing rates – in fact we’re getting them moving from the unowned, into the owned population.
The reproductive rates of owned cats are capped by very high rates of desexing, leading to the population of owned cats being in negative growth (less cats are born than die each year). In fact, according to the Pet Information and Advisory Service:
The number of owned cats in Australia has been in steady decline for 20 years.
Outgoing, affable, friendly pet cats, raised indoors are still a desirable commodity. To make up for a lack of available animals, some of the cats born to unowned parents are moving into the owned populations. Think the rescuer who rehabilitates feral babies, or the person who shelters a pregnant stray, then socialises, advertises and rehomed the kittens.
This is supported by a recent study of Victorian vets which showed of the owned cat population, those few who did have litters were quickly absorbed by the cat owning public;
Very few litters were presented at the participating clinics. Most of the progeny of these owned animals were rehomed directly by their owner in some way. Very few were taken to shelters. This suggests that the progeny of veterinary clients are not contributing significantly to shelter admissions.
So while there are still bucketloads of kittens arriving in shelters each year, these are from the self-sustaining, unowned population. If we could finally do away with the notion that owned cats are causing cat overpopulation, that would be gr8t. tnx bye.
The group uses the following example to back up their claims that the public are ‘irresponsible’:
DAMIC Benchmarking Survey – found just 41% of estimated 616,000 owned cats were registered.
But what they neglect to mention is that the same report noted the reason for the low rate of registration was likely due to “the existence of a semi-owned cat population”. They count semi-owned cats in these figures, skewing the results.
So would compulsory desexing make people adopt and desex their neighbourhood moggies? No matter how much we’d like to convert semi-owned cats into owned cats, the experience of the Who’s for Cats? campaign has shown it’s not as easy as just ‘applying pressure’.
From a survey in response to their campaign asking people to adopt their semi-owned;
The majority of respondents thought the campaign would be effective in raising awareness about the stray cat problem, and were considering taking action in response to the campaign messages. Most people thought they might take the stray to a pound or shelter, as opposed to taking full ownership of the cat. This finding is consistent with the experiences of animal shelters participating in the campaign, which have found more people are surrendering rather than taking ownership of stray cats.
While again, the survey of Victorian vets shows that people who genuinely own their animals, do in fact already desex their pets;
Overall, the level of desexing was high, with a greater percentage of cats (94%) being desexed than dogs (89.7%).
In conclusion: owned cats are already desexed and approaches which target semi-owned cats lead to increased impoundments. Compulsory desexing won’t just fail to effect the owned population, it will increase shelter killing.
If you can show me a high volume, free (or even low cost) desexing program in Victoria, which allows communities to desex their neighbourhood cats without someone needing to become the owner of each one, I’ll eat my hat. In fact, if you can show me a high volume, low cost desexing program in Victoria of any kind at all, I’ll make it my personal life’s mission to make it the most well promoted program in Australia.
Sadly, it’s not the case. Voluntary desexing has not worked, because no one has supported bringing cheap and free pet desexing to the masses. This group is looking to skip ahead to impoundment and punishment, rather than taking that first step of offering the disadvantaged in the community resources to comply. With studies showing the greatest barrier to pet desexing is simply cost, we would do well to stop allowing these groups to write off supporting the community as a solution, before it’s even been tried.
And finally
Again, I call balderdash! We’ve seen examples in San Mateo County, California in 1991 where the introduction of compulsory desexing saw cat deaths in shelters increase 86%.
In the city of Los Angeles where they passed one of the most draconian mandatory spay/neuter laws in America (requiring virtually every dog and cat in the city to be sterilized by the age of 4 months), they saw their kill numbers go up 31%, after more than five years of steady decline in shelter killing.
While the national ASPCA weighs in saying:
The ASPCA is not aware of any credible evidence demonstrating a statistically significant enhancement in the reduction of shelter intake or euthanasia as a result of the implementation of a mandatory spay/neuter law.
Yeah. No.
To reduce the number of animals killed in our shelters, we must minimise the numbers we take in. We don’t do this by creating mandatory desexing laws that invent more reasons for cats to be impounded, or for them to be seized from owners who can’t afford to desex, or from those who care for community cats. Mandatory desexing only increases impoundments, and therefore shelter killing.
Programs which reduce shelter killing, help the community with affordable, accessible pet desexing. These programs are cheaper than a law because law enforcement is really, really expensive. They’re more effective than a law because everyone is willingly involved, rather than being accused, persecuted or having their pet removed. They’re better for cats, because despite what many would have you believe, a healthy cat, is NOT better off dead than semi-owned and cared for by the community.
Stop judging, impounding and killing, and start serving your community.
