Ten years of mandatory desexing fails to decrease cat numbers

News today that despite having mandatory desexing for over ten years, the ACT have failed to see a decline in cat numbers:

The RSPCA is calling on the ACT Government to put more funding into its cat desexing laws.

ACT laws require cats to be desexed but the RSPCA says there has been a steady increase in the number of stray cats over the last five years.

But RSPCA ACT chief executive Michael Linke says the Government needs to do more to control the problem.

“We’ve got some really good animal welfare laws here in the ACT. We were one of the first states to introduce mandatory desexing laws and that was 10 years ago,” he said.

“But essentially there’s been no advertising, no marketing. The Government hasn’t invested in low-cost desexing clinics. They could fund me a couple of hundreds-of-thousands of dollars extra a year and I could do desexing procedures for free through my clinic. Little things like that.

Newsflash; advertising the importance of desexing, and providing and marketing low-cost desexing clinics are exactly the things that No Kill advocates have been lobbying for as the solution to cat population issues. And the reason they’re against mandatory desexing laws is because they don’t work, and drive unowned cats and the animals of disavantaged owners into the pound.

The RSPCA is issuing discount vouchers to Canberrans to reduce the cost of desexing their cats.

Mr Linke says the procedure can pose financial hardship for some Canberrans.

“We’ve produced vouchers, we’ve got a private funder. People who hold a Commonwealth healthcare card or a Centrelink card and who own a car just need to come into RSPCA and ask for one of these vouchers,” he said.

“Then they make contact with their local vet clinics and make an appointment for a desexing procedure and the vet will honour the voucher and give them a discount.”

Mr Linke says they would be looking to extend the program if it proves successful.

“It’s about time that the Government provide some additional funding. We shouldn’t always be relying on private funders,” he said.

“It’s a great service we are doing for the community and the Government should help us out.”

These kinds of programs are of course awesome. But the problem with working on laws first is that they take up valuable animal control resources. Enacting or changing legislation costs government money. Creating a registration or record keeping program costs government money. An enforcement model and staff costs government money. You are diverting the resources that could have been used on the programs that have been proven to work (easily accessible, low cost and free desexing programs) into paying for bigger Council animal management departments, salaried rangers to trap animals, the provision of new pounds to hold them and administration staff to oversee the new mandatory desexing mandate. What you have in the ACT is ten years and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars poured into punishing the community, rather than providing the resources for compliance.

Across the country, animal advocates are lobbying to follow in the footsteps of the ACT under the guise that ‘they have the answer’. But mandatory desexing has failed every single place it has been tried, it has failed here and your situation is no different – it will fail in your community too.

Use your resources wisely. There are lots of programs that reduce cat intakes, but shiny new laws ain’t one of them.