Photo: BBC News

If the stray cat is not friendly, it may be feral or semi-feral. Feral and semi-feral cats are able to look after themselves and, so long as the feral cat is healthy, leaving it alone may be the best option.

TNR (trap, neuter, release) is well established in Britain, while major investment by welfare groups in programs which offer free cat desexing to free-roaming cats of semi and colony carers, have for several decades supported community efforts in managing cat numbers. In fact the leading cat charity of the UK, Cats Protection helps desex more than 170,000 cats per year.

Along with embracing free-roaming cats, animal welfare groups in the UK encourage ‘barn cat’ adoptions, further cementing the idea that ‘working’ cats are a desirable member of the neighbourhood.

The effectiveness of their programs is evident; the public are encouraged to help keep cats out of shelters, meaning healthy, untame cats aren’t inflating shelter kill rates;

In Australia, the situation is quite different. Our major animal welfare organisations encourage people to feel that cats should be neither seen, nor tolerated. The RSPCA was a driving force behind probably the most well known cat campaign in Australia - the 'Who's for Cats' program. Encouraging anti-cat sentiment in the community, the program asked people to take action against cats, trap or call council and ensure any unowned cats were impounded. The results have been of course new records in the number of cats killed in pounds.

With the blessing of major animal welfare groups, councils enthusiastically mandate all kinds of restrictions surrounding cats in the suburbs, including curfews. One of the first to do so was Bendigo council. In 2004 it introduced a curfew designed to ‘get cats off the streets’ and by gosh, it did! (Read more: Bendigo: a case study in cat management)

Which brings us to today’s climate. Where cat haters rule;

A Strathdale resident claiming to be euthanasing wandering cats has Bendigo’s feline-loving community outraged.

About three weeks ago a notice appeared on a community notice board at Strathdale Shopping Centre warning cat owners that their pets would be trapped and “humanely destroyed” if they came onto that person’s property.

A subsequent notice advised the person had killed three cats, two with collars, and was thinking about “tanning their hides”.

Sure, any psycho could make up a letter like this and post it for attention, but what is really disturbing is the enormous number of comments in support of his actions;

“If your cat was locked away like all dogs this would not be a problem!”

“Simple solution to this people, keep your pets locked up like responsible pet owners should, if you can’t be sure of your cats whereabouts at all times then you should not own one.”

So if a cat is ‘out’, an owner is at fault and anything that happens to it, is really the fault of an ‘irresponsible owner’ – dangerous thinking which drives 1,700 cats into the Bendigo pound annually, most of which are killed there.

Surely, those advocating ‘for’ the cats would be calling for more acceptance? Unfortunately, no;

(Bendigo Animal Welfare and Community Services president Debbie Edwards) said she empathised with people who were plagued by nuisance cats.

“Cats are highly-developed hunters, they do kill things, and they can be noisy. No one wants to wake up to the sound of cats fighting,” she said.

“And if you’re a gardener you don’t want to be digging up cat poo, there’s nothing worse than the smell of cat poo. I fully support people’s right to use cat traps, but we don’t support the destruction of cats, that is against the law.”

By following the major welfare groups lead in supporting the idea that street-cats are beyond compassion, we’ve chosen vilification, abuse and killing for the cats of our community. We now have undeniable evidence that we’ve empowered the wrong people to act. We, as cat lovers, now have an obligation to advocate for the rights of cats to live free of harassment, if we ever want to see a future where our pet cats are safe and shelters stop the wholesale slaughter of unowned cats.

See also: There’s no No Kill without TNR

As seen on Twitter, a graphical representation of the problems at the LDH.

Is this the ‘animal welfare’ system we’re happy to have?

Image – The Newcastle Herald

The RSPCA Rutherford shelter has for several years managed pound services for the suburbs of Maitland, Lake Macquarie and Newcastle (NSW). The pound had long been criticised by animal advocates for refusing to release animals to community rescue, for working to overturn minimum impound periods making it easier to kill pets and for running overcapacity, especially during the busy holiday periods.

But in 2011, the RSPCA began negotiations with the Cessnock Council (Kurri Kurri Animal Shelter) to take over their pound, and in doing so expand the Rutherford shelter load by an expected 800 dogs and 300 cats per year.

The news was met with howls of protest from animal rescue groups in the area, with groups claiming they had been left out of discussions, that council had awarded the contract without calling for tenders and that more animals would die under the new management;

“Kurri Kurri pound has an extremely low rate of animals being put to sleep,” Hunter Animal Rescue president Jaimie Abbott said.

“This low euthanasia rate is because of the passionate and dedicated rangers and a large [number] of rescue groups releasing from the pound.

“This figure will not be maintained under the proposed new scheme and rescue groups will not be able to help save these animals.”

Despite these objections, council went ahead with the contract. So for the last few months, animals from Kurri Kurri with its “extremely low” kill rate are now being processed by the RSPCA NSW in Rutherford.

Fast forward to today, and how’s it working out for the pets?

Creatures swamp Rutherford RSPCA shelter

The number of animals dumped at the RSPCA’s Rutherford shelter since the start of the summer holiday season has jumped by almost 40% on last year’s figures with almost 1,300 pets passing through the doors over the past five weeks.

There has been a steady procession of animals since the beginning of December and staff are preparing for the numbers to continue to rise with three weeks of school holidays remaining.

Healthy kittens are being euthanised as staff struggle to cope with the unprecedented jump in the number of animals arriving at shelter.
….
(RSPCA spokeswoman Marianne Zander) said the majority of animals handed in at Rutherford had been dogs and kittens, many of the kittens having to be destroyed.
…
She said the shelter had also received many dogs and puppies, 175 of them surrenders.

She said as soon as the animals were behaviour- and health-assessed they stayed at the shelter for as long as it took to find them a new home but if it came to the shelter being too full, animals would be transferred to other shelters.

Now, this is where it gets interesting; the pound claims that should rehomable pets be in danger, they can simply be moved to other RSPCA locations. However those other locations aren’t likely a safe option either. The RSPCA NSW Annual Report 2010/11 contains no breakdown for individual shelters, but provides these overall number, state-wide for the year:

9,606 rehomed
5,509 returned
21,510 Killed (8,209 dogs & 13,301 cats)

Not very reassuring.

The Cessnock Council contract is worth more than $2 million to the RSPCA. Collecting multiple pound tenders, regardless of capacity seems to be a growing trend amongst major animal welfare organisations. And being able to explain away any surge in impounds by blaming ‘irresponsible owners’, ‘global warming‘, or the carbon tax has meant the public has largely remained ignorant the effects of pound management has on kill rates.

The RSPCA NSW is aware of the lack of capacity and had plans to expand its Tighes Hill vet clinic into an ‘animal care centre’ to cope with the pressure Cessnock city councils’ pound services are placing on the Rutherford shelter.

Unfortunately however, until other solutions are found, the lives of those pets who were once able to be saved by community rescue groups from the Kurri Kurri pound, will remain in the hands of an organisation who seems to be happy to use killing as the main tool to make its overcrowding problems go away.
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If a member of the public was to acquire so many pets that it was ‘forced’ to kill some to make space to continue to acquire more, we would call that ‘irresponsible’. When shelters do it however, they blame the community for the killing…
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Archive of news articles
1. Rescue groups want Rutherford pound animals
2. Lake Macquarie’s new policy on feral animals
3. Cessnock council puts Kurri pound decisions on a lead
4. Abandoned animals on death row
5. RSPCA planning to make room for more homeless
6. Fear for lives of pound animals
7. Animal welfare activists to protest pound closure

Like all councils in Victoria, Kingston has had compulsory pet microchipping and registration since 2007. In 2008/09 Council had 6,529 registered cats in their area and were impounding less than one cat a day (266). Despite the low number of cats ending up in the pound, cat welfare groups pressured the council to look at introducing cat management legislation targeting cat owners; requiring compulsory registration of pets over 3 months old and that all pets be desexed before registration… or mandatory desexing by stealth.

Have all these shiny, shiny new laws solved their cat ‘problems’? Of course not. As we’ve seen time and time again, mandates which target owners do little to improve outcomes for cats as overwhelmingly, cats who have owners aren’t the ‘problem’. It’s the large population of unowned cats who need help.

It did have an effect however; by 2009/10 – just one year later – the number of registered cats dropped to 5,920, putting more cats at risk of being killed at the pound by being unregistered.

Unsatisfied, the council in 2010 added a night time curfew to their cat management laws;

Kingston cat owners who let their moggies roam the streets at night will face a $60 fine from next month. The council’s controversial cat curfew comes into effect from Monday, November 1, grounding cats from dusk till dawn.

The curfew supported by the RSPCA and the Cat Protection Society;

Cat Protection Society executive director Dr Carole Webb said a curfew, already adopted by several Melbourne councils, was in the animals’ interests because it cut the risk of injury and spread of diseases such as feline AIDS.

So now they had their curfew, what happened next?

Once the curfew is official… the council will issue warning notices and ads before starting an after-hours’ trapping program.

Council acknowledged that the introduction of the curfew enables Council to more effectively target wild cat colonies and remove them from the community, minimising the chance of trapping owned domestic cats.
Council Annual Report 2009/10

Council was given the blessing of animal welfare groups to trap and kill cats without owners.

And they aren’t only trapping neighbourhood strays, they’re encouraging people to lure cats onto their property with food;

If you have a nuisance cat that you’d like us to remove from your property, your cooperation will be needed to establish a regular feeding time. To ensure the cat can be easily found when officers come to your property, you should feed it during business hours at the same time, and place each day. A feeding pattern should be established over a minimum period of at least 7 DAYS. The cat should NOT to be fed for 24 HOURS before the day the officers are to attend for trapping.

Kingston Council website

Remember, this council is being held up by cat ‘welfare’ as a council doing right by cat welfare;

Cat Protection Society executive director Dr Carole Webb said the (Kingston) curfew benefited the community and protected cats…

“I think all-round night containment is a win-win situation for everyone,” Dr Webb said.

So after all these moves to improve cat ‘welfare’, what’s the situation for cats in Kingston?

Well, the impound rate for cats remained constant;
2008/09 – 266
2009/10 – 295
2010/11 – 254
(Council Annual Reports)

(Whether ‘colony culls’ are included in these figures is unclear – the idea that anything trapped ‘after hours’ can be classified as unowned/feral and able to be killed immediately, certainly leaves this figure open to interpretation.)

And despite assertions that these laws would somehow improve cat health, feline ‘AIDS’ or FIV is still a problem the cat community.

But most worryingly, the community’s feelings around cats have changed. Having set the communities expectation that cats should be confined or removed;

Cruelty against cats in the area seem to be on the increase;

Our pet hate is cruelty in Kingston

Kingston pet owners are under fire after the number of animal cruelty complaints rose by almost 60 per cent during the past financial year…

And all cats are at risk from the newly empowered cat trappers;

Benjamin, 5, from Mordialloc with his severely injured cat Spotty, who was doused with an unknown chemical.

The two-year-old cat was taken to the pound on December 16 with pus seeping from her nose and face after a White St resident alerted Kingston Council to Spotty’s capture.

‘‘We let her out in the morning (December 15) and she didn’t come home, which was a bit strange.’’
….
The RSPCA warned against residents taking matters into their own hands regarding animal cruelty. “If people are concerned they should contact their local authorities to ensure the most effective and humane method of control is used,” senior inspector Simon Primrose said.

Seems cats have two choices; death in the hands of council, or torture at the hands of cat haters – things go from bad to worse for the cats of Kingston.

This morning, across the nation, council pounds are killing the dogs and cats in their care.

Not because they’re sick.

Not because they have behavioural problems.

Not because the community doesn’t want to adopt them.

But because it’s Christmas.

Pounds who close from Sunday 25th December through to Tuesday 3rd January do not want to have to pay holiday rates for staff to manage the pound. So they empty their establishments. They kill the healthy, the adoptable, the young and the old. At a time when literally thousands of people are opening their hearts and homes to a new pet, they close their doors to adopters.

These are pounds who throughout the year, make little to no effort to rehome pets. These are pounds who keep pets in run down, noisy, unhealthy kennels which scare off potential families.These are pounds who refuse to allow access by volunteers to help care for the animals. These are pounds who fail to promote lost or available pets online. These are pounds who burn out overworked rescuers by threatening to kill pets unless they’re collected under impossible deadlines. These are pounds who shoot the pets in their ‘care’ with a shotgun.

One by one. People’s lost companion animals, held the required 72hr hours, are disposed of like garbage. Their furry bodies dumped in pits in landfill.

These pounds are using the community’s tax dollars to run pet slaughterhouses.

Is this your local council pound?

Animal lovers must demand to know; what is your pound doing this Christmas?

.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*

‘Pet City’ is open every day 7-days-a-week except for xmas day (9am – 5pm), and on the public holidays through the xmas/new year season (10am – 4pm) to allow people looking to get a pet to visit while they’re home off work and spending time with their families.

With that in mind, why aren’t more shelters running high-excitement-pound-emptying-promotions in the lead up to this weekend? If the Sydney fish market can promote its 24hr-fish-buying-marathon on major media, why don’t we see pounds and shelters throwing open their doors, extending their trading hours and BEGGING people to offer homes for the holidays, to the pets they would otherwise kill?

Photo: The Geelong Advertiser

Above is a photo of the weekend’s protests by animal lovers, following the release of video footage of pets being killed at the Geelong Animal Welfare Society. These members of the ‘irresponsible public’ met on the stairs of City Hall, calling for such outrageous demands as, a new system where volunteers assist the shelter in preparing pets for adoption, the recruitment of foster carers to place pets temporarily and the opening of the shelter to potential families looking to adopt.

And these ‘bullying’ and ‘harrassing’ animal advocates then finished their attack on the organisation with “one of the busiest adoption days” ever seen at the shelter.

As you can imagine, the staff at GAWS have been left distressed by this experience. Acting president David Cecil confirmed the society’s lawyers are “ready to act”, with retiring president Ian Walter telling The Age “GAWS’s lawyers believed there were grounds to take out intervention orders against those responsible for the online campaign. This activity is being monitored and if it persists legal action will be taken.”

Council is also taking a tough stance. The city’s general manager, community services, Jenny McMahon said; ”We acknowledge that the situation for homeless animals can improve further, and we are working hard towards this goal.”

The ’situation’ (pets being yelled at before being killed, pets being killed by heartstick, hundreds more pets being killed than being saved) ‘can improve further’. How positively inspirational.

ABC’s 7.30 Report…

When a … tragedy or random event hits, people look for someone to blame. If there’s no one to blame, sometimes they look for someone to hate, even if it is ultimately self-destructive.
Seth Godin

Last night a four-year-old girl was fatally attacked by a neighbour’s dog in Melbourne.

According to the most detailed report, the dog identified as a ‘pit bull cross’ escaped a neighbour’s property, crossed the street and attacked a woman. As she rushed into the house, the animal followed her, attacking a five year old, four-year-old Ayen Chol and her mother Jaclin. The dog’s owner then arrived and removed the dog. Ambulance teams treated Ayen at the scene but could not revive her. The two other injured were taken to Sunshine Hospital in a stable condition.

In the short time since the news broke, this tragic incident has received extensive media exposure, including nearly 400 results on Google and hundreds of TV new, interviews and editorials.

Despite all the hysteria, few details on the circumstances surrounding the attack are available. Information on how the dog was kept by its thirty year old owner aren’t clear – was the dog a pet, or was it an undersocialised ‘backyard’ dog? Had the dog acted in an aggressive way previously or had it been encouraged to do so? Was it trained and exercised regularly? Was it registered with council? Was it chained? Was it desexed?

This lack of detail hasn’t stopped Graeme Smith adopting his usual position of throwing all pit bulls and their owners, even responsible owners of mixed breed dogs, under the bus;

Lost Dogs Home general manager Graeme Smith has called on the State Government to urgently conduct a review of dangerous dog legislation in the wake of the attack.
…
“Pit bull terriers and pit bull terrier crosses should be declared dangerous and then they would have to be desexed, vaccinated and microchipped and kept in enclosures on their property or inside the house,” he said.
…
“Pit bulls should be treated like swimming pools, they should be fenced off from the rest of the community. They are deadly.”

The truth is the breed and its crosses are already restricted in the state. Owners are required to notify their council, build an enclosure, keep their dogs muzzled and on a lead when off their property and display prescribed warning signs at all entrances to the premises where the dog is kept. Restricted breed dogs born after 2005 are not allowed to be registered and it’s illegal to purchase a restricted breed dog.

But, as has been the experience in each instance where Breed Specific Legislation (BSL) has been enacted, the banning of pit bulls has failed to reduce the number of people injured by dogs. It has certainly failed to save this child.

In addition, thanks to breed bans, responsible pit bull breeders breeding for temperament and health, are now non-existent in Victoria. What is left is a hodgepodge of dogs bred by a catalog of backyard breeders with varying success. And therein lies the rub.

Rather than support the oft repeated ‘fighting dog heritage’ used to justify the culling of pit bulls by supporters of BSL, the spectrum of what a modern ‘pit bull’ actually is has become irreconcilably muddied. Rather than being the domain of ‘tough bad guys’ and an easily identifiable dog breed, literally thousands of families now own a dog which has ‘pit bull’ somewhere in it’s heritage. If we accept that the traits of the pit bull are incompatible with modern dog ownership (I personally don’t, but let’s play devil’s advocate), proponents of BSL need to ask themselves, at what saturation point does being ‘part pitbull’ become a problem for the community? Does a labrador pit bull cross need to be seized from its family and killed? What if that labrador is only 25% pit bull? What about 5%? What if the dog is actually a mastiff crossed labrador but looks like a pit bull?

Meanwhile, the ban does nothing to target dogs which aren’t pit bull types at all, but who are dangerously aggressive.

A pit bull boxer cross

Continuing down the path of restricting pit bulls will only affect those people with loving, trained, pit bull family members. Owners who seek to have a big, unsocialised, aggressive dog will just dump their pit bull and move onto another breed. Or keep them even more hidden from authorities, since having something ‘illegal’ is likely of no real concern to them, or may actually be more desirable.

We need to treat each dog as an individual, simply because they are. Blanket breed restrictions fail to help owners keep happy, healthy dogs. Killing family pets who’ve done nothing wrong, does not make the community safer. And until we look at the real circumstances that lead to dog attacks, we will continue to see horrific, yet preventable tragedies like the death of little Ayen.

See also: You mean you didn’t want dogs gunned down in the street?

The problem with BSL

Up until just a couple of years ago, pounds were able to explain away poor performance simply by saying their community was ‘irresponsible’; that they were bad pet owners, that they were buying the wrong pets on impulse, that they were not desexing their pets, that they were giving up and abandoning pets too easily, or that they simply didn’t care enough to adopt. And that was why pounds killed pets.

And the community enabled their poor performance by swallowing these excuses without question.

However, in 2011 something has changed forever.

We’ve been able to find out that we, as Australians, are overwhelmingly responsible and loving pet owners. That we rarely buy the wrong pets on impulse. That we nearly universally desex our animals. That only a tiny percentage of us give up our pets. And that given half a chance, we’d love to adopt.

So we’ve had to dig a little bit deeper for the reasons why pets don’t survive being impounded. Whats more, we’ve been able to compare the performance of one pound with another. With transparency like never before, we’re able to see the single determining factor in a pound’s success in saving the lives of pets; is whether or not they reject killing as a function of animal management.

Historically, it has been high kill, low adoption shelters who peddled the idea that there was ‘too many animals and not enough homes’. But these conclusions weren’t based on numbers of animal intakes vs potential pet adoption market size – instead they were applying simple, unsubstantiated reverse logic; pets are killed in pounds therefore there is too many.  The mythical ‘pet overpopulation’  was then used to protect pound management and hide their ongoing failures from the public.

Today, if we’re looking for real answers, we need to look at the facts, not the fiction – we need to look at the data and the experience of successful shelters.

Around 500,000 pets enter shelters ever year. Kill shelters will say there is no way to find homes for all those animals. But the good news is most of them don’t need adoption. A large number are untame or semi owned cats who need to be kept out of the shelter with TNR and ‘Secret Cat’ programs. More than 80% of the dogs are simply lost & could be reunited with their families if the shelter emphasised redemptions. Others are going to go to rescue groups. While a few are going to be hopelessly ill or injured & will need to be euthanised. Rather than need to rehome all the pets, we really only need to find homes for about one in five of them.

Is it possible?

Are there 100,000 people looking to bring a new cat or dog into their homes this year?

The answer isn’t just yes, but yes, and many, many more times that. Based on the number of pets who pass away naturally, over half a million homes open up each year with loving owners looking to replace their cat or dog. While some are already committed to getting one from another source like a breeder, if we can influence just some of the others to adopt their next pet – we CAN save every adoptable animal. We potentially have half a million people vying for just 100,000 available pets, or in other words, even if 80% of people get their pet from a source other than rescue, we could still zero out the killing.

And that is simply the organic numbers. This doesn’t include people who are getting a pet for the first time. Or people returning to pet ownership after a break. Or people expanding from a single to a multi-pet household. Or people who’d be willing to care for a community cat. Or temporary homes that would foster a pet for a time.

All shelters and pounds have to do to harness this market is decide to stop killing. There are tools to make it happen. There is a model to follow. The numbers show that we can be a No Kill nation.

Ending shelter killing is not only possible, but a certainty once we reject the excuses and demand those in charge of running our animal shelters and pounds comprehensively implement the proactive lifesaving policies & procedures of the No Kill equation. It is community pressure which will force pounds to improve adoption & reclaim rates. It is concerned individuals finding others in the community, to apply pressure to *their* pound in *their* neighbourhood which will ultimately save the lives of pets.

The pound system we get, is the one we accept. If you are an animal lover who wants better for homeless pets than a convenient death in an animal shelter, don’t wait for government to fix the problem. Don’t think animal welfare groups have it in hand. Don’t join a Facebook group & think it will be enough to bring about change. You must activate. Get involved.

The No Kill Revolution Starts with YOU

The No Kill movement gains momentum in Oz.

Resident action group forms to effect change at Campbelltown Animal Care Facility

Activists to pound for a change at Blacktown

GAWS & The LDH – The times they are a-changin…