Yay failure! SA Dog and Cat board follow in Victoria’s faltering footsteps

Anyone who’s followed this blog knows the enormous disaster the ‘Who’s for Cats’ program has been for cats in the state of Victoria. Not only seeing a 50% increase in complaints about cats, and encouraging violence against them, but surging cat impoundments to record levels requiring millions of dollars worth of new infrastructure to ‘process’ (and mostly that means kill) cats.

However, with pounds and shelters not only entrenched in killing, but wedded to killing through valuable, multiple pound contracts, the Who’s For Cats Program has not been held up as a failure, but as a model other councils can adapt and use to be seen to be doing ‘something’ about homeless cats. Introducing the The Dog and Cat Management Board’s ‘Good Cat’ program;

In an effort to reduce homeless numbers, the board will launch a web-based campaign with the Local Government Association next month called Good Cat SA. It will inform people about the implications of feeding cats they do not own.

People who feed cats but do not consider themselves owners will be asked to take full ownership responsibility or offer the cat to a shelter for rehoming.
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“Both owned and homeless cats can create nuisance within a community if allowed to roam,” (Dog and Cat Management Board executive officer Ben Luxton) said.

“Unconfined cats cause nuisance by spraying, fighting, yowling, defecating in gardens and can vector disease to responsibly owned and confined cats.”

Using exactly the same process as the Who’s for Cats campaign (paint cats as a nusiance, paint feeders as ‘the problem’, encourage neighbourhood vigilantism in asking people to trap free-roaming cats, blame [the community/the economy/global warming] for the resulting increase in impoundments, build bigger shelters/take on bigger pound contracts), this also uses Dr Carole Webb’s (the brains behind WFC) data to condemn semi-owners and feeders.

South Australia are looking to follow up their web-based ‘Good Cat’ campaign with mandatory desexing and microchipping (ignoring the fact the majority of these cats don’t have owners to microchip or desex them). Of course shelters are overwhelmingly supportive, knowing that they are the direct beneficiaries of any resulting surge in impoundments through increased need, increasing council contracts, or as we’ve seen in NSW and QLD, direct goverment gifts of multi-million dollars to build new facilities.

Animal Welfare League animal care manager Leanne Page said about 80 per cent of the 7600 cats at the shelter last year were strays.

Ms Page said the shelter wanted mandatory desexing and microchipping of all cats and dogs in SA, excluding registered breeders.
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RSPCA SA chief executive Neale Sutton said his organisation took in more than 3000 strays in the past financial year, and urged owners to desex their cats.

The combined intakes of the two major shelters in SA, the RSPCA and AWL equal about 10,000 cats. To desex 10,000 cats at $100 a pop is $1 million dollars. If the situation was to stay exactly as it is, all of these cats could be desexed and released, or desexed and rehomed for $1 million per year. Chances are with a lot of the ‘semi-owned’ being collected in the desexing programs, the number would go down each year, until very few cats were entering shelters. It would be a self-reducing program. Successful models like these, which see happy communities and happy cats (such as New Zealand and the UK) are already working across the world.

So why aren’t cat groups beating down the doors to have these kinds of programs implemented? Because there’s no council contracts, no big new buildings, no expansion, no multi-million dollar facilities build by the goverment… in keeping cats out of shelters and effectively solving the cat problem.