Wyndham Council are having ongoing trouble with their cat laws;
The council has issued 239 fines for unregistered dogs and just 13 for cats, from April to September this year.
Based on the $227 fine, the total fines for unregistered dogs was almost $55,000 and, for cats, less than $3000.
This council has only tried to introduce a ‘small’ law in mandatory microchipping and registration – but the big problem with cat laws has been revealed – just how do you enforce them?
I often have discussions with cat advocates; “we need mandatory desexing/registration/microchipping/confinement!”, they’ll say; “if we had then the shelters wouldn’t be full of cats!”
My response is; if you want to keep cats out of shelters, why not offer services which help the small groups of people who are not already compliant, and unowned cats? To which I always get;
YEAH, BUT WHO’S GOING TO PAY FOR THAT?
And therein lies the rub – in their minds, cat laws are considered ‘free’, while services obviously cost money.
Many communities claim their new laws haven’t worked because of a lack of enforcement. Obviously if you create a law that has no budget or resources allocated to ensuring the law is complied with, then your law isn’t going to be very effective. And if you’re looking to get compliance up around 80-90%, you’re going to need a really strong mode of enforcement to be successful.
So, you’re going to need an enforcement budget. At least one staff member plus whatever resources/systems they need. But one person isn’t going to be very effective; you’ll probably need more. Could you add it to other, existing staff’s duties? Maybe. But with cat laws, you’re going to need to literally go door to door, looking for non-compliant cat owners. Most councils don’t have the resources for this. So the easiest and most common way to ‘enforce’ these laws? At the point of impoundment:
When asked why more dog owners than cat owners had been fined, the council said fines were often issued to people picking up their unregistered dogs from the local pound and that, unfortunately, many cats were never collected.
About 1100 cats were impounded in Wyndham in 2009-10, with 935 of these put down.
The current fine for a unregistered cat (hence the collection fee) in Wyndham = $227. A new cat from the newspaper? Probably free.
By using this vulnerable time to try and enforce our laws, we ensure a cat will die in a shelter who has an owner. We should never do anything which impedes or discourages a person from collecting their animal, and instead do everything we can to try and send the animal home.
So short of paying a government department a huge sum to create a program to go door to door (pulling resources away from other programs like outreach desexing), cat laws are unenforceable.
Your council has bucked the trend and has promised to work to enforce their new cat laws, so they have a chance of success. Great!
But is it?
Assuming the aim of the law is to keep cats out of shelters (you can stop reading now, if the law you’re designing is simply to ‘punish cat owners’ or ‘get cats off the street at any cost’) we need to understand what happens when we do try to ‘enforce’ our new laws.
Where do kittens come from?
It is generally accepted that the owned cat population is in negative growth (ie. less cats are born from owned parents, than are needed to replace them);
“The number of owned cats in Australia has been in steady decline for 20 years.”
“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.”
Kersti Seksel
People who are ‘good’ owners, already microchip and desex. Kittens have very little perceived value (unlike puppies), so most litters from this group of people are ‘oops’ litters. Truly ‘accidental’ litters make up a tiny fraction of the number of the kittens born each year
In most cases, owners who have an ‘oops’ litter are generally nice people and work to find these kittens homes themselves, so they don’t enter the shelter system. (ref) They then get their cat desexed.
People who are ‘bad’ (irresponsible) owners genuinely don’t care about the cat’s welfare. They likely acquired the cat through passive means and do not undertake other ‘good’ owner behaviours (taking the cat to the vet etc). When the cat has its first litter, mother cat and litter end up at the shelter. These guys are the ‘owned’ kittens/cats entering shelters and make up around 21% of intakes. (ref)
Disadvantaged owners, unowned and semi owned cats. I’ve put these guys all together, because they’re our biggest ‘target’ for positive change.
When these cats have litters, either all go to the shelter, or the kittens remain in the environment to continue the breeding cycle. These guys are large contributors to shelter cat numbers as urban cats are generally well fed and healthy (“80% of cats entering shelters were non-owned or semi-owned” ref)
How does an enforcement model of cat laws effect each of these groups? (or why cat laws are unenforceable)
Targeting ‘good’ owners isn’t necessary, as the contribution they make is minimal.
Targeting ‘bad’ owners is labour intensive/expensive. First you have to know where to look (we’re back to door knocking everyone). When you confront the owner, the cat will likely be handed over as there is no bond between pet and owner. If you do this on any kind of scale you increase shelter intakes (bad). Plus, since there is clearly the resources to support a cat, another cat will likely move in and chances are it will be undesexed and the cycle will continue.
Targeting disadvantaged owners doesn’t help them. If you fine them, they can’t afford to pay you. In the case of mandatory desexing, it can force them to give up their cat. Given they’re pet lovers, they’ll probably get another. So now you have one loved cat in the shelter, and a new cat in the home that is likely still not compliant with your laws.
Some semi-owners may be happy to comply with cat laws (excluding confinement) if they don’t already have the prescribed number of cats/can afford desexing. Other semi-owners may not have the resources to do more than feed, but we should encourage them to continue to do that and support them with accessible cat desexing surgery. To punish them for non-compliance ensures the cat either – loses its carer – or enters the shelter – or both. After impoundment, we can almost certainly guarantee another cat another moves in, continuing the cycle.
While unowned cats don’t give a hoot about your new laws and will continue doing that thing cats do. Do they now fall foul of the new laws? Then they’ll probably be trapped and killed in the shelter.
So which one of these groups do our cat laws really target effectively? Go back and read them again if you’re not sure.
The answer is none of them. If anything, it targets the cats. More cats entering the shelter, not less. More cats remaining unclaimed, not less. More cats being killed, not less.
Our ‘not free’ cat laws, the ones we were using as the ‘solution’ to our cat management issues have backfired and caused even more cats to lose their lives. Without a long-term strategy, these laws are unenforceable.
Some cat advocates understand all of this, but push ahead anyway. “Any law is better than keeping the status quo”, they’ll say. “We understand that there will initially be a spike in impounds/killing, but for the greater good we must restrict cat ownership today, to get a better result tomorrow”. It’s the old ‘kill them to be kind’ mentality.
But the truth is, there are no examples where the pursuit of these laws has seen a positive outcome for cats. There is no evidence that any variation has worked, ever. The ACT has had mandatory desexing for more than ten years, with impounds still going up. The City of Casey has confinement, registration, mandatory desexing and door knock, and their cat impounds remain constant (40% higher than other councils). City after city after city has struggled with cat laws unsuccessfully.
If we are to truly begin to see a reduction in the killing of cats in Australia, then we need to stop chasing a failed model and start looking at those programs which do work to keep cats from dying in shelters. We need to recognise that when even so called ‘cat protection’ groups save less than 9 in 100, a shelter is the worst place for a cat to be. Especially a cat who is anything but a house pet.
We must finally discard the myth that by ‘punishing owners’ we’re somehow helping cats. We must choose not to remain stuck in a system based on killing. Effective cat management takes more than simply dreaming up new cat laws; it’s going to take compassion and a completely different approach to put us on a new, successful path.
See also: Profitable and popular – why cats can’t get a fair deal in Australia
