… in Victoria, Australia’s first compulsory cat registration system was introduced into Parliament.
‘The Companion Animals Bill’ had been long desired by animal welfare groups in the state, as they had a theory that with cat registration laws passed, ‘irresponsible’ cat ownership would be reduced and the state’s… cat –> pound = dead… issue would be solved!
General manager of the Lost Dogs’ Home Mr Graeme Smith, said the new legislation was overdue.
“It’s high time the Government got off their backsides and updated the legislation. We’ve been campaigning for this for almost a decade.
…
“There is now economic incentive for people to have their pets desexed.” Mr Smith said that in the short term he expected a lot of pets to be brought in but this would weed out the irresponsible owners.“We would then have a population of more responsible pet owners which will benefit all pets.” [1]
… the legislation had stalled. The Municipal Association of Victoria (the overseeing body for local councils) opposed the compulsory cat registration plan, speculating the “estimated total cost of enforcing cat registration” would be (holy heck!) $11.5 million per year.
The animal welfare groups hit back. They would be happy to collect and kill the cats as required, for a pittance. That’s just how much they believed all the killing would be worth it. Just give them the nod…
“The collection and care of stray and unwanted cats and kittens can be contracted out to any bona fide animal welfare organisation.
Our own shelter has offered to do it for $2,000 a council a year – a fraction of Mr Barfus’s estimates.
“We have fought 10 years for this. If this Bill is going to be emasculated, I think we’ll tell the Government just to drop it.”
– Dr Graeme Smith, Dog and Cat Home, North Melbourne. [2]
In fact, if they didn’t get their way they were going to leave councils to fend for themselves…
Melbourne’s five largest animal welfare agencies – the RSPCA, the Cat Protection Society, Lort Smith, the Lost Dogs’ Home and Australian Animal Protection – have decided that if the cat provisions are not passed into law, they will refuse to accept or collect cats unless they are injured. No strays, no wild cats, no pets whose owners don’t want them.[3]
Major animal welfare groups upped the pressure on government, taking out large advertisements in state newspapers, and holding a rally at Parliament House.
April 1992 – Dr Graeme Smith (Lost Dogs Home) and Hon. Ian Baker, Minister of Agriculture, and the RSPCA
The Domestic (Feral and Nuisance) Animals Act 1994* was proclaimed on the 29 November 1994.
The Domestic (Feral and Nuisance) Animals Act 1994 will stimulate the promotion of responsible cat ownership and will support and complement community education programs directed at setting higher standards of cat ownership and welfare in the community.
Peter Penson, Director, Bureau of Animal Welfare – ‘Victorian cat legislation’ Urban Animal Management Conference 1995
… Cats were required to be identified, and registered. Differential registration fees were set to encourage desexing. Local Government was given powers to introduce containment/curfews. While a state levy for responsible cat ownership education was introduced and used to fund the “State Government Responsible Pet Ownership Program” and what would become known as “Who’s For Cats”.
The results were immediate…
Animal shelters are destroying up to three times more kittens since compulsory cat registration fees were introduced last week.
Victorian Animal Aid Shelter general manager Stephen Meacher urged councils to increase the limit from two to four cats.
He said the shelter was housing twice as many cats as the same time last year.
At the North Melbourne Lost Dogs Home, between 50 and 80 cats and kittens have been dropped off each day.
The shelter’s general manager, Dr Graeme Smith, expected the number of destroyed cats at the centre to triple from 5000 to 15,000 a year.
He blamed the sharp increase in unwanted cats on “inflexible and pedantic” municipal councils charging too much for registration.
Dr Smith said the new legislation was a step in the right direction, but needed across-the-state uniformity.
“In the long term, the new laws will make sure cats are owned by more responsible people,” he said.
“If I was to dwell on the cats being destroyed, I wouldn’t last a minute in this place.
“I need to look at the big picture.” [4]
RSPCA Victoria Annual Report 1995/96
… and assumingly, after two years of this unprecedented level of killing, done on the cheap for local councils by willing animal welfare groups…
… the Department of Natural Resources and Environment estimates two-thirds of Victoria’s 765,000 cat owners have not paid the compulsory registration fee.
Councils contacted by the Herald Sun this week said they were struggling to enforce compulsory cat registration laws and were owed between $70,000 and $250,000 each.
The Lost Dogs’ Home called for a crackdown on owners of unregistered cats as a survey showed almost 25 per cent more strays were taken to the shelter between November and January than for the same period a year ago. [5]
From the start, animal welfare groups allegedly councils were not “enforcing” the laws enough (despite an enormous increase in impoundments, which would indicate the laws were actually being enforced quite a lot). According to cat groups, not enough cats were being collected and killed by local councils.
(Dr Graeme Smith) said any review of cat registration should ensure councils provided full animal control services in return for cat fees.
The failure of many councils to pick up stray cats and provide other animal control services could be contributing to low registration numbers, he said.
While declaring the laws a success because of the increased killing, animal welfare groups simultaneously declared the laws a failure because of the increased killing… it was quite a feat of logic.
… the same animal welfare parties as behind the original legislation – Australian Animal Protection Society, Cat Protection Society of Victoria, Lort Smith Animal Hospital, the RSPCA Victoria and The Lost Dogs’ Home – came together to promote a new strategy. Called the ‘Cat Crisis Coalition’ it claimed…
… it’s members have been compiling data relating to cat welfare in order to gauge the magnitude and nature of the cat overpopulation crisis and assess the impact of legislation upon this enormous problem. [6]
And what did they find?
Victorian shelters receive 53,000 cats and kittens annually. These figures have remained constant from 1990 – 2003.
Five years of cat registration, had done little, if anything to change the situation for the cats in Victoria – except fill the pounds to heaving new levels.
… the same groups converged to discuss their cat progress.
The RSPCA Cat Welfare Seminar, saw Dr Hugh Wirth (President, RSPCA), Dr. Carole Webb (Director Cat Protection Society Victoria) and representatives from government (Bureau of Animal Welfare) all come to review nearly ten years of the laws.
What did they find?
That since the introduction of the laws in 1996, and despite the surge in registrations, the estimated cat population had remained stagnant. That is, cat registration didn’t equal ‘less cats’.
Also, rates of desexing amongst owned cats was almost universal in every city (even without mandatory desexing).
However despite this, the numbers in pounds had continued to climb…
But IT’S OK YOU GUYS!
Although cat laws in Victoria haven’t worked to protect cats, or bring down shelter kill rates in now, 18 years – the same groups who designed the laws and took on the contracts of expanded killing that went with them, have a NEW PLAN!
You’ll never guess what it is?
At the RSPCA Animal Welfare Seminar 2014, Carole Webb (now ex-Director of the Cat Protection Society, an organisation who when they last published stats were killing more than 90% of intakes) presented the RSPCA driven plan for the future of cat management, dubbed ‘Feline Specific Legislation’.
First she dubbed the cat laws to date a success;
Twenty years on significant improvements have occurred:
– Cat ownership clarified, responsibilities of ownership defined and process of introducing and implementing the Domestic Animals Act has significantly increased cat owner awareness and compliance.
Certainly, this is true. By hard-lining on cats who are unfortunate enough to find themselves sans an official owner, they have been able to design a system which enables thousands of healthy animals to be targeted for killing, by animal management.
– Cat pound infrastructure has been established with regulation and standards and husbandry significantly improved within the system.
– Shelter medicine has evolved into a discipline
Because the best measure of success of any cat laws, isn’t lives saved, but much bigger, richer pounds. And personal development to secure those in the industry a bragging-rights job.
Feline Specific Legislation:
– (to date has) embedded the basic requirement and framework for management (of cats) within the Domestic Animals Act, treating cats as honorary dogs – next step is to look at feline improvements.
– Councils to use Domestic Animal Management Plans to address cat issues within their community
So no stopping now! The slow motion car crash of Victorian cat management, is going to be the foundation from which they plan to continue developing slaughter based policy (and why wouldn’t they? It gave them nice facilities and cushy jobs).
– Cats require desexing for population control.
“Cat desexing” legislation seems innocuous enough – why not just pass it? But all the while the community can be distracted – that we believe we need focus on increasing an already nearly universal level of compliance by cat owners, who are currently either adopting their cat already desexed (about 20% of acquisitions) or desexing the cat that joins their family (95% and higher) – we aren’t looking at the failings of our animal management system to do their jobs effectively.
That the system supposed to humanely manage dogs and cats, fails one entire half of that mandate.
That while across the world, the solution to killing cats in shelters has been found, and implemented successfully over and over again, with more than 239 (and counting) cities now publicly declaring their achievement.
But that the cat shelters in Victoria are still continuing to choose killing.
The twenty year history of Victorian cat laws is a case study demonstrating that those currently leading cat strategy have miscalculated and obscured the facts for their own gain, and continue to do so. They have never been successful. They have never chosen to use the tools that would replace killing, and in doing so have betrayed both cat owners and the cats themselves. Even now when the successful path is a well-trodden one.
If the initial Municipal Association of Victoria projections were to be believed, potentially $230 million has been invested into this cat management system. I’d guess that kind of money could have desexed every cat who needed it, in the greater melbourne area, several times over.
Instead we have a system where pounds grow more enormous every day, the impounded cat nearly always ends up dead and the free-roaming cat population remains completely unchecked. This was not a good use of the community’s resources, and the groups responsible – the ones who profited directly by engineering the system – should be held to account.
We need to stop listening to people who claim to be experts, but whose only achievement has been to expand the killing to the point where Victoria’s pets are the most disadvantaged in the nation. We need to stop listening to kill shelters.
References
[1] ‘Anger over pet fee plan’ (Herald Sun, November 1991)
[2] ‘Claws out in the cat debate’ (Herald Sun, April 1992)
[3] ‘Claws drawn in cat fight’ (Herald Sun, March 1992)
[4] Rush to save kittens (Herald Sun, April 1996)
[5] Millions owed in cat fees – (Herald Sun, March 1998)
[6] http://www.catcrisis.com/CC_AboutUs.html
*The title of this Act was changed from the Domestic (Feral and Nuisance) Animals Act 1994 to the Domestic Animals Act 1994 by the Animals Legislation Amendment (Animal Care) Act 2007.
The council registration is supposed to protect cats…right? All 3 of my registered cats were killed last year, what are they doing to protect my cats, or will I just be paying them money so they can stand there and tell me it’s my fault?