Yarra Ranges Council (Victoria) has ruled that cats will have to be kept on private properties at all times…
Residents have accused Yarra Ranges Council of not consulting properly with the community after a 24-hour cat curfew was approved for the region last week.
The curfew, which means residents have to contain their cat inside their properties at all times, will come into effect within six months, and was supported unanimously by councillors at Tuesday night’s meeting.
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Yarra Ranges Council director planning, building and health Andrew Paxton said the council would work with residents to manage cats caught wandering at large and could provide cat cages if requested.
The law was a replacement for a 2007 nighttime cat curfew (8pm – 6am) which had been revoked in 2012.
Council also has an April 2010 mandate which saw all new cats needing be desexed before they could be registered.
According to the Ranges’ Annual Reports, cat registrations in the City had been steadily dropping;
| Date | Registered cats |
| 2003/04 | 8,937 |
| 2007/08 | 8,404 |
| 2010/11 | 7,842 |
| 2012/13 | 7,622 |
Also, despite charging cat owners more than $20 per cat per year in registration fees, and passing some pretty regressive laws to date, cat management in the Ranges seems to be in complete disarray. For a start, the current registration laws aren’t being enforced…
(it) is estimated that at least 50% ‘owned’ cats remain unregistered
2013-2017 Domestic Animal Management Plan
The current kill rate for impounded cats, is more than one in every two impounds (53% – pound provider, Animal Aid). As is often the case, impounds got significantly worse after Council started targeting cats.
Their first Domestic Animal Management Plan, adopted by Council on 14 Oct 2008, saw just 326 cats impounded.
By 2009, the number had jumped to 517 and are not yet close to recovering.
| Date | Cats impounded |
| 2007/08 | 326 |
| 2009 | 517 |
| 2010 | 490 |
| 2011 | 457 |
| 2012 | 440 |
Council has identified that free-roaming cats without owners are a problem (2013-2017 Domestic Animal Management Plan), though they have no actual data to support their assertion…
The estimates of the stray and feral cat populations in Yarra Ranges is unknown….
And while they seem to recognise that taking in unowned cats are unlikely to result in an owner coming forward (go figure)…
Most “stray” cats are not lost, but simply have no owner. No responsible owner is looking for them…
Council don’t seem to appreciate that this population of semi-owned cats who are cared for by the community, aren’t suddenly going to become house-pets…
… they continue to survive in neighborhoods by residents feeding them to prevent starvation. In so doing enable the cats to breed which exacerbates the problem.
Cat confinement for owned pets not only targets the wrong population of cats, according to Councils own projections – it is an open day on the free-roaming, unowned and semi-owned population. Stay tuned for another surge of impoundments and killing in the Yarra Ranges.
