Cat owners are often blamed for unowned cats roaming in the neighbourhood. The thinking goes – if cat owners would just keep their cats confined/desexed, there wouldn’t be all these cats out there in the ‘wild’ and shelters wouldn’t have to kill.
The theory cat owners ‘are to blame’ is the basis for many cat management campaigns by animal welfare groups. But unfortunately, while wildly popular, it lacks any resemblance to the actual story of cat population dynamics in Australia.
The truth is, cats were deliberately introduced by the first colonies of Australia about 200 years ago, in an attempt to control rabbits, mice and rodents. Cat populations grew to occupy 99% of Australia, even before cats were ‘pets’ by our modern standards. And unowned cats have lived in self-sustaining urban colonies for as long as we humans have lived in cities.
Until the 1950’s, when cat litter was invented, ALL cats – pets and unowned – lived outside for most of their lives. Cats were working animals. Pounds and shelters didn’t collect cats, as they needed free access to the outdoors to do their ‘jobs’ – which was poison free rodent control.
When pounds started to collect cats just as they collected dogs, suddenly it became a requirement of so called ‘responsible’ cat ownership to start confining cats for part or all of their lives. This ironically, was largely to protect cats from the pounds themselves, who began catching and killing cats in huge numbers.
People who loved their pet cats, brought their cats inside as asked to do so. Therefore, a small percentage of the overall cat population was removed from the streets, to then become housepets.
Now, this is where it gets inconvenient for those who want to blame cat owners for our current cat issues. Removing this small number of pet cats from the pet population had absolutely no discernable effect on the self-sustaining, free roaming, unowned cat population. Unowned cats quickly refilled any spaces and resources available. There were and are literally millions of them.
Largely, cats live where cats CAN live. And they like living right alongside us. As our human, urban sprawl sees more cities, more resources open up for unowned cats, and so do many more opportunities for cats to enter shelters either through new animal management programs, and more concerned citizens dropping them at the pound.
‘Catch and kill’ programs – that is those programs which see all cats captured by the thousands, a handful of pets reclaimed, and the unfortunate majority killed – have failed since they were introduced. The reason they fail is because they ignore the inconvenient truth about cats. Punishing pet owners by killing unowned cats is illogical and ineffective. And continuing to punish cat owners for a ‘problem’ they are not significantly contributing to, and never have, was never going to somehow magically achieve the aim of less killing.
Rather than cat owners being the driver the killing in pounds – pounds collecting more and more cats from their outdoor homes, has actually been the driving force behind skyrocketing impoundment rates.
Lots has been written on this blog about effective cat programs. Programs which stablise populations, reduce cat behaviours that cause a nuisance in the community, improve cat welfare… and eliminate the need to kill huge numbers of cats. But here are three current program updates from this month which show exactly how it is done.
We are a New “Breed” of Animal Control.
The Spartanburg Animal Services Team, in conjunction with Animal Allies Clinic, has TNR’d 218 feral cats this year. Zero Killed…
Live release rate for cats approaches 90% in Albuquerque
In the first year, 59% fewer cats were killed in the shelter in 2012/13 versus 2011/12! And with lower intake numbers and increased adoptions, the “live release rate” for cats in Albuquerque is a high 80% now each month. We believe it will be no time before Albuquerque can add its name to the ever-growing list of no-kill communities.
So how have we achieved such fantastic (and sustainable) results? The program works in two basic ways.First, any stray cat brought to the shelter deemed to be unadoptable is immediately turned over to the community cat program. These cats are not your friendly lap kitties; heavy gloves and humane traps are required to manage them. This category of cat constitutes the large majority of those killed in most shelters because they are not appropriate for adoption to the public. In fact, they truly should not have been placed in the shelter to begin with, but rather managed in the community on their home turf. Now, in Albuquerque and in other progressive cities, those cats are fixed, ear-tipped and promptly returned to where they came from.Second, we identify the hotspots, as it were. Where are the cats who are coming to the shelter coming from? Once we know that, targeted colony management efforts spring into action in that specific area. This ensures that the problem area producing the cats is brought under control. This second effort means that many fewer cats ever enter the shelter because fixed cats don’t have kittens. It’s that simple, and the impact is dramatic. This part of the program has resulted in 25% fewer kittens being seen in shelters during this year’s kitten season versus last.
Friendly competition makes TNR night more fun.
This was Stray Cat Alliance’s first foray into a mass-trapping endeavor, and while Best Friends was the first to trap 50 kitties, SCA ended up trapping 66 cats the first evening. But they didn’t stop there; they trapped a total of 111 cats and kittens and got them ready for Pet Care Center in South Los Angeles to fix them. The challenge enabled SCA to pass their 2,500 spay/neuter mark for their target zip codes, and founder Christi Metropole is thrilled.
Free Fix LA was able to trap a total of 54 cats and had 50 cats in the bag, so to speak, by 11:40 p.m., officially winning the competition, but the cats were the real winners. In the two years of the Free Fix LA program, over 6,000 cats have been spayed or neutered. FixNation, as always, hustled to provide the surgeries.
Making the case for a paradigm shift in community cat management
Are common cat sheltering and animal control policies helping cats? Are they humane? Effective? Not according to Dr. Kate Hurley, Director of the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program.
The time has come, she says, for shelters to consider radical solutions to the suffering, stress, illness and death that are the fate of so many cats in our nation’s animal shelters, including an array of positive alternative approaches such as TNR or not taking them in at all if we can’t offer a lifesaving outcome.
Please join us on Thursday, June 27, at 9 PM Eastern Time as Maddie’s InstitueSM presents the first of a two-part series, Making the Case for a Paradigm Shift in Community Cat Management, Part One.In Part Two, scheduled for July 11th, an expert panel will conduct a Q&A discussion on the information in Dr. Hurley’s webcast, answering questions submitted in advance as well as live questions from the audience.
In this free webcast, Dr. Hurley will examine assumptions underlying traditional sheltering practices and compare them to the most recent evidence-based information regarding the health and behavior impacts of stress on sheltered cats and the statistical likelihood of a live outcome for an unsocialized cat taken into a shelter.
Information presented will include:
– Common assumptions on which sheltering programs for cats are based.
– Evidence and data analysis: Are common sheltering policies about unsocial/unowned cats evidence-based?
– Do our current methods of running TNR programs really make a difference to the overall problem of community/feral cats coming into shelters and subsequently being euthanized there?
– As our shelter system moves to a model of capacity planning for humane care and adoption, where do community cats fit into the flow?
– What lifesaving alternatives really work, and how do we implement them?
– When is it appropriate to just not take cats into our shelters at all?
Only with DIFFERENT programs can we hope to see a better future for our nation’s cats. An inconvenient but undeniable truth.
