After a successful campaign branding cats as environmental vandals and a community nuisance:
Unowned cats are also a significant source of nuisance in the community. They prey on wildlife, spray strong smelling urine around houses and cars, fight with owned cats, spread disease, yowl at night, and defecate in gardens and sandpits.
Who’s for Cats
Victorian animal welfare groups had done such a number of the perception of cats in the community that they are now lamenting the fact people now view cats as environmental vandals and a community nuisance:
… cats in Australia suffer from an image problem. They are not valued, often branded environmental vandals or a community nuisance.
Carol Webb Executive Director – Cat Protection Society of Victoria
So they put their heads together and came up with a new campaign to improve the situation for cats;
Moggies.com.au is a place for shelters and rescue groups to showcase their cats for adoption. It is a site that celebrates the benefits of adopting a moggie and that promotes cat welfare and responsible cat ownership. Moggies raises the profile of cats as first class citizens.
We want to improve outcomes for shelter cats by increasing cat adoption throughout Australia.
Which is excellent as between them, animal welfare groups in Victoria claim “more than 53,000 homeless cats are received by the animal welfare shelters and each year there are simply not enough homes to go around so more than 35,000 cats and kittens have to be put down
BECAUSE THEIR AREN’T ENOUGH HOMES PEOPLE!
So being that its ‘spring’ and ‘kitten season’ and all that, we’d obviously be chocka full of cats, right? The Cat Protection Society claim to take in 15,000 a year and The Lost Dogs Home around 12,000 so leading into the weekend in Melbourne surely we’d want to have as many people as possible take time out from their grand final barbecues and visit to adopt. After all there’s lives at stake!
So how many cats are listed on the Cat Protection Society website in preparation for the weekend? 4
How many cats do the Cat Protection Society Victoria have on their Moggies website, the one designed to “improve outcomes for shelter cats by increasing cat adoption” in preparation for a the weekend where people could visit with their families and during the busiest time of the cat rescue season? 7
How many cats do the Lost Dogs Home in North Melbourne have listed on Moggies? 1 On their own website? 1
I know it can be a hassle to take the time to take a photo of an animal and put some of its details on the web or on your homepage or on Facebook or anywhere. I know its hard on a Friday afternoon to put your weekend adoption hours somewhere prominent so the public know that they can visit you and save a life. And I know it’s much easier to blame the community as ‘irresponsible’ and the government for not introducing the laws you want, while you kill the cats you failed to promote. But this shouldn’t be about what’s easy, this should be about what saves lives…
“It comes down to leadership. If your leader is in the mindset that the shelter is a helpless victim of society, no progress is ever going to be made. Shelter directors who see the shelter as ‘the end point’ of pet ownership are not people we need to be doing the job.
We need shelter directors who see the shelter as THE ANSWER to homeless pets – sorting them out, finding them homes, moving them forward.
Time and past time to break out of the old mindset.”
Yes Biscuit (comments)
