Showing posts with label restrictions on cat ownership. Show all posts
Showing posts with label restrictions on cat ownership. Show all posts

Sunday 14 January 2024

30% of New Zealand cat owners are opposed to cat confinement and almost 50% are ambivalent

NEWS AND OPINION: This is a recent study from New Zealand about confining cats to the home i.e. full-time indoor cats. It's a modern trend and one that is being discussed in New Zealand as it is in many other developed countries. The objective is twofold (1) to keep the cats safe and (2) to keep wildlife safe from cat predation.

The New Zealand government and local governments within the country are particularly concerned about cat predation on wildlife - native species. They have a mentality which is similar to that found in Australia. It's one in which a focus is placed on protecting native species. The free-roaming domestic cat undermines that objective. But what do the citizens of New Zealand think about domestic cat confinement?


A survey of 395 cat owners as reported online on the Newshub website tells us that 30% of New Zealanders are opposed to keeping their cat inside the home full-time. Only 6% of cat owners in New Zealand do it at the moment while 17% are open to the possibility and 48% are unsure about the concept of full-time indoor cats.

This is not resounding support from cat-owning citizens for keeping cats inside the home. It doesn't surprise me. I've written in the past about the motivation of cat owners in keeping their cats indoors all the time and the prime objective is not to protect wildlife but to protect their cats. And in protecting their cats they avoid the emotional distress of their cat being harmed outside perhaps on the road.


Ultimately, the bottom line is that normally cat owners keep their cats inside to avoid the distress that they will suffer if their cat is harmed on the road for instance. To use a long word it is an example of anthropocentrism.

This, I would argue, explains why the percentages from this study are rather poor for those people in authority who wants to keep cats inside to protect wildlife.

The general trend in New Zealand and Australia is for the authorities to want to change the law or make demands on cat owners to keep their cats inside. This survey represents somewhat of a pushback from that desire.

Cat advocates in New Zealand think that it is impractical to demand that all cat owners keep their cats inside all-time and it might be too expensive in for example having to build a catio or a cat confinement fence all around the back yard (£4,000). Both these options are fairly expensive. Although a mini-catio is cheap and better than no catio:


You can't keep a cat locked up inside your home full-time unless you do something to entertain them which means enriching their environment. Hence the need for a catio. Even then it wouldn't be as good as allowing your cat outside in terms of mental stimulation.

The survey doesn't say this but a lot of cat owners want the best for their cat which means they want them to be happy and a domestic cat is happiest when they are out hunting! That sounds very anti-conservation and it is but if you are focusing on the cat only that is your objective.

New Zealand's cat advocates say that making micro-chipping and sterilisation obligatory would be effective over the long term in protecting wildlife. The problem with that plan is that it will take a very long time and it is difficult to enforce. Both these weaknesses in their plan will upset the authorities because they want something tangible quite quickly because they are elected officials and they need to demonstrate results i.e. success.

My personal view is that it's good that New Zealand is discussing these things but the problem is very hard to totally fix. One plank in the solution that has not been discussed in this news media article is education. If every cat owner was perfect they would microchip their cat, they would sterilise their cat, and they would take their cat outside on a lead or if they confine their cat to the home they would make sure that it was thoroughly enriched for their cat's entertainment. Many cat owners are far from perfect of course.

One issue is a lack of knowledge despite many years of discussion about cat caregiving on the internet. Things have improved by there is work to do.

I think education about cat ownership needs to be in the frame here. I would like to see domestic cat husbandry introduced into schools. It could be wider than that. You could have a course about companion animal husbandry for schoolkids. That should and could be part of the curriculum.

-------------

P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Monday 8 January 2024

Amsterdam joins those municipalities introducing cat restrictions to protect wildlife

Although the world centre of domestic cat owner restrictions and feral cat eradication is Australia, the attitude of the Australians appears to be spreading to other parts of the world. The news, today, is that Amsterdam in The Netherlands is keen to introduce restrictions on domestic cat ownership and to alter their policy towards feral cats.


There is no doubt in my mind having read cat news articles for very many years on a daily basis that the attitude towards domestic cats has changed and continues to change. The direction of movement is restrictions on cat ownership and to, in some way, eliminate feral cats either as fast as possible or over a long period of time.

In Amsterdam a campaign and planning has started to encourage cat owners to:
  • microchip and sterilised their cats
  • keep the feral cat population to a minimum
  • no longer release feral cats under TNR programs to "ecologically vulnerable areas"
  • Ensure that owners place a bell or a collar around their cat's next to make it much harder for the cat to prey on wildlife particularly birds. Comment: the brightly coloured colour, an anti-predation device, is fairly successful (50% success) in warning birds of an approaching cat. However, bells are less successful because cats learn how to keep them quiet! Neither is going to work that well. And I can see difficulties in convincing a large number of cat owners to place a wide, brightly coloured collar around their cats' necks. It looks a bit peculiar and it certainly doesn't look aesthetically pleasing which is quite a big factor in the human-to-cat relationship because caregivers love the appearance of their cat. It is one of the important aspects of the relationship. I'm being negative but perhaps you might say that I am being realistic.

Research indicates that in The Netherlands domestic cats kill around 18 million birds a year. That is probably an estimate and we don't know if it is accurate.

At one stage, a Dutch organisation, Huiskat Thuiskat, applied to the court to try and force the government to prevent people from letting their cats roam freely unsupervised. It didn't work of course. Cats are allowed to roam unsupervised because they aren't a danger to people whereas dogs can be.

I'm told that there are about 2.9 million domestic cat companions in The Netherlands.

----------

P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Monday 4 September 2023

Japanese islands issue ID cards to all the cats

The Amami Islands to the south of mainland Japan, are considered to be a living fossil because it is cut off from the rest of the world and has great wildlife and for that reason. The local government has decided to issue ID cards to all the cats on the islands. ID cards are already issued to their owners. This, therefore, is an extension of the scheme.

ID cards for cats on Amami Islands
ID cards for cats on Amami Islands. Image: Kazuaki Kanda.

But unlike for humans, the cats won't be getting the cards for social security and tax purposes but, instead, to ensure that they are registered and thereby improve cat ownership with the subsequent benefit of less predation on wildlife. The government wants the cat owners of these islands to keep their cats inside full-time.

A government spokesperson said that, "By issuing the card, we want to increase the number of owners who keep their cats indoors and accelerate momentum to eliminate unwanted cats". Comment: they feel that they have a cat problem and a predation on native wildlife problem it seems to me. This move seems to be a reflection of the general trend worldwide to keep domestic cats indoors full-time more often to protect wildlife. There is a greater sensitivity to the protection of wildlife in many jurisdictions in 2023.

In every country or every jurisdiction there comes a moment when the government takes steps, quite severe steps, to protect wildlife from domestic cat predation. That moment has arrived on the Amami Islands.

Feral cats have been a persistent problem on the island because they prey on the Amami rabbit which is designated a "special natural treasure" by the government. And there are other species that the government was to protect from predation.

The card issued to people is called "My Number Card". For cats it will be "Maya Nyamber Card"

This is a play on words because "nyan" means cats in the local dialect while "nyamber" is a wordplay on "nyan" which sounds a bit like the meowing of a cat.

The inspiration for this seems to have come from a very popular video published in 2011. Nyan Cat is a YouTube video uploaded in April 2011, which became an internet meme. The video merged a Japanese pop song with an animated cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso flying through space and leaving a rainbow trail behind. The video ranked at number five on the list of most viewed YouTube videos in 2011.

The card will bear the name of the cat, their address and details about their appearance such as the colour of their coat. The card will carry a photograph of the cat and an emergency contact number other than the number of the owner.

Currently around 2500 cats are registered on the island. There are approximately 1600 strays. More than 90% of domestic cats have been spayed and neutered and 73% have been micro-chipped.

Friday 23 July 2021

Is Chris Packham a cat hater?

Dr. John Bradshaw in his book Cat Sense writes that the "British wildlife TV presenter Chris Packham, a self-confessed cat-hater, appeared on BBC radio describing cats as sly, greedy, insidious murderers and calling for them to be shot".

Chris Packham
Chris Packham. Photo in public domain.

John Bradshaw was writing about the predation of domestic cats and wildlife and how bias can sometimes be introduced into dissertations and studies by scientists on the predation of wildlife by cats. And the bias normally leans towards denigrating the cat. Perhaps the bias is inadvertent but it comes from an inherent bias within some people including scientists, sometimes.

Chris Packham's interview with Yahoo News way back on January 30, 2013 makes it clear that he is not a cat hater and that he admires the athleticism of one of the world's top predators. He doesn't want to criticise the cat per se but he wants to criticise the people who own cats and who don't take sufficient steps to ensure that their companion animals do not prey on wildlife.

He was responding, in the interview, to an article at that time about a Nature Communications study which claimed that in America domestic and non-owned cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals annually. It was claimed that cats were more dangerous to wildlife than traffic accidents, pesticides and poison all together!

Dr. Bradshaw, by the way, said that in one study about the impact of cats on wildlife in the UK and which was carried out in 1997, the questionnaire sent out to cat owners was inherently biased. That study produced an estimate of 275 million animals killed in Britain each year by pet cats. He claims that the questionnaire was designed in a way which encouraged the people who completed it to submit their results only if their cat had brought in some prey during the five months of the survey. This introduced bias. The problem is that this figure of 275 million is still widely quoted by many influential organisations such as the RSPB, the British Trust for Ornithology and the Bat Conservation Trust. What is not fact, becomes fact over time and it is the cat who becomes a victim.

The answer to the question the title is that Chris Packham is not a cat hater but he wants cats to wear collars which he believes would reduce the predation rates on birds and animals by 45%. He also claims that if pet cats were kept in at night it would reduce predation rates on birds and animals by 50%. And he also says that a problem is that "cat owners do not neuter their pets". Well, I think a lot of them do neuter their pets but there are some who don't and as usual there is a minority of cat owners who are irresponsible.

Chris Packham believes that there are too many cats in the UK. I don't think we know how many cats there are in the UK! The same applies to America and other countries. We make estimates but we don't know exact figures. In 2010 it was estimated that there would over 10 million owned cats in the UK but the Yahoo News article states that the number had shrunk to 8 million.

But we have to add the recent surge in pet ownership during the coronavirus pandemic. I have read that there has been an increase of 3.2 million companion animals in UK homes over the 16 months of social distancing. That's an extraordinary increase but once again I suspect that these are estimates that we can't truly rely on.

Obviously, reducing the number of pet cats in the UK will reduce the number of animals that they kill. That is the simple argument of Chris Packham. It's an argument which is undeniable whereas proposal such as registration of domestic cats, limiting the number of cats that somebody owns, mandatory sterilisation and curfews might not lead to a recovery in local wildlife says Dr. John Bradshaw.

Featured Post

i hate cats

i hate cats, no i hate f**k**g cats is what some people say when they dislike cats. But they nearly always don't explain why. It appe...

Popular posts