WA Cat Laws driving pets into pounds

The picture above is the impounds (unclaimed/unidentified) for a single WA pound.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that before these cats were impounded and brought into the pound under the directive of these new laws – and their lives were being threatened with ‘euthanasia’ because ‘overpopulation’ – that they were living with someone caring for their welfare. That is, they had an owner.

I posted this picture on my Facebook page with the following caption;

Breaks my heart watching WA pounds heave with intakes thanks to our new cat laws.

Look carefully at these cats – these are people’s pets! I don’t know how anyone claiming to work in animal ‘welfare’ can justify a system which drives these guys into the pound, where their lives are then in danger.

This is not good for the community, and it sure as shit isn’t good for the cats…

 

And it resulted in some great discussion. A lot of people still aren’t getting ‘it’. That is, our pound system is designed to push for laws to increase impoundment, to increase the size of the pound system, and to guarantee the pound system continues to grow its business model. That organisations who depend on animals coming in to exist, aren’t in the business of reducing intakes… they’re in the business of impounding pets.

Neither of these facts are in aid of animal welfare.

Which is why when healthy pet cats are being collected off the street and are killed, it gets rubber stamped by those who should be challenging the notion of killing pets being good for their welfare. And why those same organisation continue to push for new laws, even when decades of those same laws have been shown to without fail, to increase intakes.

It’s not about animal welfare. It’s about pound providers ensuring they have work to do.

So, in the spirit of helping other animal advocates debate ‘it’, some of the facebook discussion is detailed below;

 

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“Blame the irresponsible owners, not the cat laws!”

There’s a lot of SHOULD whenever it comes to cat ownership, and defending high kill rates of cats in shelters.

‘People SHOULD..’

Good. Yes they should. Agreed.

But the cats entering the pounds now show they DON’T. Or at least they haven’t.

Now the pounds are full of their cats and we’re killing them.

What people SHOULD do is irrelevant. These cats weren’t in danger until WE came along.

Well played ‘animal welfare’. Well played…

 

“We should hope for a day when we don’t need pounds!”

The ‘kill pounds’ didn’t exist until we had the law. We built the pounds to enforce the law!

Prior to the passing it’s new laws (which ironically were sold on the back of the notion they would reduce cat intakes), WA had one of the lowest rates of cat impoundments in the country, second only to the NT.

 

“When these domesticated species exceed the number of loving homes available to care for them, then rationalise that less than optimal environmental alternatives will suffice.”

This is wandering off into the free-roaming cat debate, which obfuscates the issue here – that is, these are pet cats.

There is no benefit to anyone to seize pets and pull them into a high-kill system (which averages reclaims of 2-4%), when they are healthy and otherwise cared for.

If a cat is fed and otherwise healthy, it has someone caring for. Or several people. To suggest they are better off in a kill shelter is absurd.

Constantly equating owned cats with unowned cats, as an issue that needs a single solution (ie. impoundment), is exactly why decades of effort by cat ‘welfare’ groups has done little more than make bigger pounds.

If we’re going to drive for ‘laws’ to protect animals – we must design laws that protect animals. Driving healthy cats into kill pounds is no protection.

“If a responsible person’s animal companion goes missing there is a high success rate of them being reunited if the person intends that to be the case.”

This is simply not true. The reclaim rate for cats hovers around 2%. In real numbers, that means for every 100 cats we take into a shelter just 2 cats will be returned home. For every 1,000 cats, 980 will remain unclaimed and their lives will be in danger.

That is utterly terrible odds. We know a cat is far, far more likely to find his way home on his own, than via our channels. Especially, when we know a lot of cats don’t have a single ‘owner’ who will go out of their way to find him. They don’t even know he’s missing, because he was never lost. He was simply one of the cats who live with multiple families.

 

“Loyal and responsible people will do everything possible to have their animal companion back in their care. “

YES owners should abide by our prescribed standards of care, including keeping cats indoors AND fetching them from the pound when we bring them in.

However, the reality is, up until 50 years ago (when cat litter was invented) ALL cats lived outdoors with varying levels of ownership involvement.

Just because we WISH something to be true, doesn’t make it so. Seizing healthy, fed cats off the street, and killing them, because their owners don’t subscribe to the level of care we deem ‘appropriate’ today, is a pretty unethical way for animal ‘welfare’ groups to get their point across.

And killing people’s pets to teach them a lesson about ownership seems an extraordinarily cruel and unusual approach for those claiming to be working to improve the lives of cats.

 

“Why do you think people don’t collect those animals whom they have chosen to care for from pounds?”

That’s the thing. It doesn’t matter why.

If they cat is fed and otherwise healthy, it simply doesn’t matter why the cat isn’t claimed. It just doesn’t.

All that should matter to a pound is…

…. how can we keep this cat in his home,

… so we don’t have to bring him to our shelter, where he will stress out and likely get sick,

…. where we know he is statistically extremely unlikely to be claimed,

… and where we already have so many cats, we’ll probably have to kill him?

 

“There certainly seems to be an influx of cats hitting the pounds since the cat laws came into force, as people become ‘trap happy’ and are trapping other peoples cats.

Its been a crap year for animal welfare organisations with the first Cat Act year – but we knew it would be so and the warmer weather has made it drawn out.”

The general feedback is most places are reporting several times more impounds than they are usually trying to juggle…. and its autumn not spring!

With all the new capacity created with the expanded pound system, councils accepting pets, encouraging the public to trap strays, it is not unexpected that impounds have increased – it in fact was predicted by supporters of the laws.

What is debatable is whether or not we can kill our way now, to less killing at some point in the non-specified future.

 

“But Councils weren’t accepting cats before, and now they are, so of course the rates of impoundment have gone up!”

If councils weren’t accepting cats before, but now they are, why are we talking like that is a good thing? Why is more cats coming in, some kind of laudable goal? Surely keeping cats OUT of pounds was what we were trying to achieve? We’ve got it ass about.

 

“I spoke to Cat Haven unofficially the other day – and aside from sheer exhaustion, she said that NO HEALTHY TREATABLE CAT had been euthanised in over 2 years.”

Unfortunately ‘healthy’ and ‘treatable’, excludes ‘feral’… so it comes back to whether killing otherwise healthy untame cats is a reasonable use of community resources.

Which then also extends to whether using council resources to sweep for, or accept, cats is a good use of those resources.

And it’s not insignificant resources, it’s tens of MILLIONS of dollars.

 

“Well, doing NOTHING wasn’t working. At least we’re doing SOMETHING now.”

Sure, we may have been doing ‘nothing’ before (not true, but for arguments sake) and now we’re very busy – so we feel like doing SOMETHING which much be better than nothing, right?

But we’re confusing activeness, with effectiveness.

If you were lightly on fire, and I was walking past with a jerry-can of fuel, would you prefer I did SOMETHING and threw it on you, or NOTHING and did not?

Of course you would choose for me not to throw fuel on your already bad fire situation. In fact, even better would be for me to do something useful – go look for help, or water…

Cat laws are promoted as better than doing NOTHING, but in execution, the simply add ‘fuel’ to a proverbial shelter cat ‘fire’.

We could have invested these tens of millions into community cat desexing programs – or the water to our fire – but we have chosen to chuck on the fuel and see what happens. The theory being, that the fire will burn out eventually.

But the experience of other communities tells us the cats never stop coming…

 

“Eventually people will realise and become more responsible.”

Twenty years ago, Dr Smith of the Lost Dogs Home, said that cat laws would increase intakes short term, but the extra killing would increase the number of responsible owners. Two decades later, Victoria boasts the country’s largest cat pounds. At no point do the cats stop coming in.

We are following in their footsteps, simply because we are using the same failed thinking…

The ‘bad owners’ thing is also interesting when you consider such a huge number of people passively acquire their cats – that is, they just ‘show up’ one day.

If you take in a cat and start to care for it – are you a ‘bad owner’?

I would suggest you’re actually pretty much the opposite – a compassionate person who doesn’t like to see an animal suffer.

Now, the fact the cat has wandered into your life, probably means it is pretty self sufficient. You probably have little say over its behaviour (after all you didn’t raise it). And although you like, maybe even love the cat, given the choice, you would have probably chosen a lovely ragdoll or the like – not an iffy-street cat.

Now suddenly, just for looking out for a stray, you have animal welfare groups yelling at you…. RAH RAH RAH! BAD SHITTY IRRESPONSIBLE OWNER YOU SHOULD KEEP CATS INDOORS!

(Way to outreach there btw).

So, said cat doesn’t come home one day. Do you look for it? Nope. You never really signed on for a cat anyway. Maybe it will come home and that will be fine. Maybe it won’t. That will be fine too.

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As a cat organisation, advocating for confinement, you now have that cat in your ‘care’. Chances are you have nothing to offer a not-really-a-housecat, but a terrifying few days impoundment and then a lethal injection. Hardly a win for the cat.

Or, you could have simply left it with its owner. Not let perfection be the enemy of perfectly fine. Checked with the owner if they needed some support in getting the cat fixed.

But dead cats are make us feel superior. We feel we’ve done a good thing punishing bad owners with dead cats. Which is sadly, a system based about validating our feelings, rather than helping anyone.

This is why our pounds are full. And they always will be.

 

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