We all know community foster care and rescue groups make a vital contribution to animal welfare across the country. Thousands of pets every year owe their lives to volunteer pet-lovers who give up their time to save the lives of needy animals. Rescue and foster groups involve the whole community to bring about life saving outcomes for pets, caring for them as if they were their own in healing family environments. Community rescue and foster groups are the life blood of the animal sheltering process.

Victoria however, has legislation which is hindering animal rescue and foster groups from operating. This week the internet has been awash with outrage that Victoria’s Department of Primary Industries (DPI) sent an notice to pounds across the state, advising them that to release pets to community rescue groups was in breach of the ‘Code of Practice for the management of dogs and cats in shelters’. The problem they claim, is that anyone taking pets from pounds should be registered as a domestic animal business (including individual foster carers) and that would mean complying with several group housing standards designed for shelters and pounds;

Dog Rescue Association of Victoria president Trisha Taylor said volunteers take unwanted dogs and cats into their own homes and spend time and money rehabilitating them so they can be rehomed. They did not want to have to turn their homes into animal shelters and report to the bureau.

”The rules for shelters are onerous and intended for multiple dog situations,” Ms Taylor said. ”This is no different than you taking an extra dog into your home and having to declare yourself an animal shelter, with the bureau coming to check you meet the code’s standards.”

She said volunteers did not put the rescued cats or dogs in cages, but treated them as pets until they were adopted out.

She said the bureau wanted to either gain control over rescue groups or shut them down – a move that would force up the kill rate of abandoned animals.
The Age

The situation has always been difficult for community rescue and foster groups in Victoria and this is why it hasn’t really thrived as it has in other states. The code of practice that they are referencing, has been in existence for years and if you were to interpret it in its most strict sense, rescue and foster would have always been illegal in Victoria. Some pounds have been interpreting the laws in a relaxed fashion to ‘get pets out the door’. Others have chosen not to work with rescue and use the laws as an excuse to kill animals. Depended entirely on who was in charge.

At most Victorian pounds, more animals are killed than are rehomed. Each and every day, thousands of dogs and cats are shot with firearms or given fatal overdoses of anesthetic, and their bodies discarded. All the while rescue groups stand by with safe foster homes at the ready, but are refused access to these animals. Often it is because pounds are afraid that by letting rescue groups in, they will be no longer able to hide poor performance, inhumane conditions or simply because ‘working with rescue is too much trouble’.

The groups in Victoria are doing an excellent job driving an ongoing effort to get recognition for community rescue. Taking advantage of the momentum of adoption and No Kill initiatives here and overseas, there is no doubt there is enormous community support for the awesome work that they do. The result is a clash between legislation from the nineties and the new belief system of the community about the valuable role of rescue, which is, almost unappreciatedly, only a few years old.

Politicians are promising to review the code of practice to make provision for rescue groups should they be elected. But they are doing so with a double-speak of ‘not wanting to have an unregulated rescue industry’. Even with evidence that the rescue industry is thriving in other states and that the animal outcomes are excellent, they still don’t trust the public to know how to care for pets. However, despite these unneccesary hurdles, this could be the very opportunity Victorian rescue groups have been waiting for.

If the behaviour of rescue groups in Victoria is outlined in a new Code of Practice, so should the rights of those same rescue groups be.

Community rescue and foster groups should be supported through proactive efforts to remove artibitrary rules that make it more difficult for them to operate. But if rescue groups do have to apply for a pre-determined financial status, provide certain reporting criteria and offer particular treatments and services to pets, in order to be an ‘authorised’ rescue group – pounds and shelters across the state should no longer be able to block or restrict access to death row pets. All groups should be granted a legal right to take any pet that a pound is unable to save. No pound should be able to choose to kill a pet if a rescue group is willing to take it, rehabilitate it and find it a new family.

In the case of somewhere like the Lost Dogs Home, who last year adopted 3,101 dogs, but killed 3,242 – each one these dogs should have been made available for further treatment by a rescue group. A pound management’s descretion to pick and choose whether they will work with rescue groups, when groups are willing to save and treat animals with money from their own pockets must be removed in the new legislation. Pounds must work with rescue groups and this must be made law if pets are to survive the shelter system.

If Victoria insist on standardising rescue and continuing down the restrictive path that has cost so many lives in the past, we must use it as an opportunity to gain recognition for the valuable role we play in the community.

The rights of rescue groups to save lives must be enshrined in law.

It gets worse.

From the Lost Dogs Home 2009/10 Annual Report, for the 24,426 cats and dogs impounded, the outcomes were as follows;

3,101 adopted
13,594 killed (3,242 dogs, 10,352 cats)
7,645 returned to owner

They also recorded “Revenue from continuing operations” as $11,854,916.

We will no longer stand by quietly while pets are killed unnecessarily, while this group grows rich off people’s compassion for companion animals. There will be a lot of talk of ‘intentions and outcomes’. A plea to stop being angry and to join forces. They’ll say we’re being divisive; why can’t we all just get along? But if to get along is to excuse and validate killing, then collaboration is not the answer.

The genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in.

One of the stated outcomes of the Hobson’s Bay Domestic Animal Management Plan is to:

Address any over-population and high euthanasia rates for dogs and cats.

From 1st September last year, council moved its animal control and after hours service in house, and its impounds to the Lost Dogs Home in North Melbourne. Their impound figures for the year released yesterday, show that 1,337 pets were impounded and their outcomes were as follows:

78 adopted
723 killed (84 dogs, 639 cats)
536 returned to owner

This is a single council. The Lost Dogs Home holds more than a dozen of these pound contracts, moving pets from the shires where they’re collected to a ’super pound’ in North Melbourne. Despite long term efforts to encourage them to work with the community, and even when they are killing many times more than they are saving, they can and do block community rescue groups from taking pets, choosing to kill them instead.

This week community rescue groups in Victoria sent a message to supporters imploring them to support the mandate that large animal welfare organisations be forced to work with them, rather than kill homeless pets. New interpretations of the animal welfare codes of practice in the state seem designed to phase out these community groups entirely, when clearly the need for them has never been greater;

Currently in Victoria – under current legislation according to the Code of Practice, it is illegal for Rescue Groups to save companion animals lives.

As responsible, registered organizations we continue to do so, for one reason. To save lives.

Based in the Community, we are self funding and promote desexing, microchipping and vaccination of all animals, responsible rehoming and pet ownership. We are often the last stand for a pet who would otherwise be killed.

We want the right to save lives. To take animals and work within the community as we have been doing for years. And we want the Government to recognize we are a vital and necessary service. Please help us by supporting the Dog Rescue Association of Victoria.

We are incorporated, with guidelines, a constitution and the knowledge of more than twenty years combined in saving animals in our state.

Please join us in spreading the word. We want the right to save lives. Join us on Facebook and tell your friends.

Victoria’s pets deserve better than a quick death at the hands of uncaring mega-pounds. To find out more about how to support the Dog Rescue Association of Victoria, please click here to visit their website.

In his paper ‘Temperament Testing in the Age of No Kill’ for Best Friends Animal Society, Nathan Winograd discussed the limitations of temperament testing in the US, namely that it wasn’t very scientific;

Temperament testing is a series of exercises designed to evaluate whether an animal is aggressive. Because dog behavior is highly specific to context, it is unfortunately not enough to say that a dog is friendly and of reasonably good temperament if she comes into a shelter with her tail wagging. The flip side is also true. Because the shelter is a highly stressful, unnatural, and frightening environment for a dog who has just been abandoned by a family, the fact that a dog is scared and growls at staff on intake is not enough to make a determination that the dog is unfriendly and vicious. So it is not only fair, but a good idea, for shelters to evaluate dogs to make sure they can safely be placed into loving new homes.

But temperament testing has many limitations. It requires skill and training; the results greatly depend on the environment in which the test is conducted; and, because its predictive validity has not been established by any stretch, it can – and often does – result in dogs being wrongly executed.

However, despite their limitations, temperament tests are still a useful tool in a No Kill setting; as when using them as a guide, rather than a pass/fail for euthanasia, the process of determining which rehabilitation a dog needs can begin.

Dog behavior runs the gamut from simple bad manners, such as jumping up on people, to global undersocialization. Some behaviors are easily remedied; others are beyond the ability of a shelter to rehabilitate. Certainly no shelter should kill a dog for bad manners, and a no-kill shelter is obligated to rehabilitate all treatable behaviors, even those like food aggression.

But the situation in most pounds (and some shelters) across Australia is that a fail on a temperament test is a guaranteed death sentence. With limited investment in developing skilled foster carer programs, or supported behaviour modification programs, a pound can relieve itself of any obligation to save the pet simply by determining that it ‘failed’ its temperament test. Even if the issue is common and treatable and the prognosis for rehabilitation is good (like cases of ‘jumping’, ‘mouthing’ or ‘resource guarding’) a failed test usually means the pet will lose its life.

Previously there has really only been US research available on the effectiveness of temperament testing in determining a pets future behaviour in the home. Surely, Australia shelter workers are more highly skilled than our US counterparts? Our temperament testings more scientific and advanced? And surely in our pounds, where pets are killed in the thousands, rather than the millions like in the US, pets are given a much more fair evaluation and chance at treatment?

A Review of Behavioural Assessment Protocols Used by Australian Shelters to Determine the Adoption Suitability of Dogs

From the Oct-Dec 10 Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science examined data from 11 shelters and pounds across six states. They also observed 50 shelter-dog assessments and interviewed 26 shelter workers.

Guess how many of the pounds and shelters were using standardized protocols that had been scientifically validated.

Zero.

In fact, only two of the testing protocols had specific and standardized step-by-step instructions on how to administer the assessments. And “there was little consistency in how the protocols were administered, partly because of constraints including limited availability of time and resources”.

When it came to interpreting the results of the test “in most cases there were no guidelines to assist scorers in interpreting the results of the individual assessments. Because the protocols were so diverse internally, it was often impossible to sum scores into a meaningful total. Decisions regarding the fate of assessed dogs were therefore made subjectively.

So if staff have to make a subjective assessment on results, how confident are they that they’ve had enough support and training to accurately asses a dog? Just 35% felt ‘very confident’, while 50% felt ’somewhat confident’.

“The interviews with shelter staff revealed, notably, that experience was not correlated with confidence in the current assessment protocol or confidence in the respondent’s ability to accurately assess dogs.”

Potentially, therefore, shelter staff are required to make important decisions based on inadequate training, potentially invalid assessment protocols, and subjective interpretations of behaviour in which they have limited confidence; shelter staff members decide which dogs live or die (are euthanized) and which dogs are released into the community. This is unacceptable in terms of placing both dogs and members of the public at risk. It also potentially causes undue stress to shelter staff and may result in high staff turnover and traumatic stress symptoms.

When the outcome of a failed test is death, the lack of true scientific data on temperament tests leaves both staff and animals vulnerable. As we move forward improvements in how we use and deliver behavioural assessments and increasing capacity of treatment programs for pets who enter the pound system will become an integral part of modern sheltering. Killing pets rather than providing options for them to be rehabilitated will no longer be acceptable to pet lovers, shelter donors or the shelter workers themselves.





See also: The Foundation for the Charismatic, Good Looking, Healthy Homeless

Imagine if a major animal welfare group wanted to ban pet ownership. They came out and said; “we want to ban pet ownership outright… some exceptions granted where we deem appropriate, but overall we don’t think people should be allowed free ownership of pets.”

Would you support their initiative? My guess is that if you’re a pet owner (especially one with a healthy cynicism for the wisdom of some of the programs animal welfare groups have implemented over the years) you would say no.

But what if I told you, that animal welfare groups are proposing just that? And that it has a lot of support in high places;

On the issue of granting licences for pet owners, Dr Wirth says while it hasn’t been adopted by either party as policy, it’s a work in progress.

“Absolutely, that’s one battle we haven’t won yet, it’s been RSPCA policy for at least forty years to my knowledge, we just haven’t won that round with the politicians yet. We will win of course.”
ABC News

Imagine having to get a licence to keep a dog, much like we do to drive a car.

That’s the law which veterinary surgeon and adviser to Dogs NSW Peter Higgins wants the State Government to adopt.
ABC News

The kind of system we have at the moment – dog registration – is just like car registration. Pretty much anyone can own a car if they’re willing to pay a fee. Those fees are used towards insurances and services for car users. It is the system of ‘approved until proven unfit’ – the licence may be revoked, but only if you do something wrong.

But a licence is different; a licence is a temporary revocable permit that allows the licencee to have something or to do something that would be illegal to have, or to do without the licence. It makes the standard ‘illegal until proven fit’. It is illegal for anyone to drive a car on the road until they apply and get given an ‘exception’ – a car licence – which can be refused or revoked at any time, for a myriad of reasons.

What a pet ownership licence proposes is that pet ownership is illegal to everyone in the community unless they have a licence (an exception) granted.

The difference doesn’t sound like much, but it has huge implications for pet ownership in the future. Who decides who will make a ‘good enough’ pet owner to be granted an exception? With the basic ‘right’ to own a pet removed, pets become your ‘property’ only while Council deems you should be able to hold a licence.

What stops Councils deciding arbitrarily that pet ownership causes them too much trouble and just refusing to grant licences to whole segments of the community based on region or demographic? What other criteria could be added in; size/weight limits (’you can only own a pet under 25kg), breed specific limitations (’no bull breeds allowed’) or even stricter requirements overriding your veterinary relationship (’this licence is granted under the condition you pet be desexed at three months of age’), or a income test (’you can only own a pet if we think you can afford it, you have to earn $45k a year’).

By allowing pet licences to be developed, we will have given away any right the community has to own pets, and replaced it with the need to negotiate the privilege. Which might be fine as long as the system is never unfair, bureaucratic or misused. But anyone whose ever been turned down for an animal adoption knows the system isn’t always fair, anyone whose ever tried to collect a stray pet knows the system can be bureaucratic and anyone whose ever had to fight a council’s pet related decisions knows it is often misused.

We need to think these ideas through, even when they’re being pushed by animal welfare groups who claim to know what’s best for us. Becoming active in researching these new laws should be a priority of every pet owner who wants to be able to own pets in the future, as we all have to live with these changes.

See also; A right, not just a privilege. Why ‘dog ownership licences’ do everyone a disservice

If you follow the Victorian news, you’ll know that there has been an ongoing push by animal welfare groups in the state for compulsory desexing. Ignoring evidence that the majority of owned cats are already desexed, they worship ‘mandatory desexing’ as the holy grail of cat management. One by one councils give it to the wishes of cat groups, either implementing curfews, confinement or desexing mandates, all of which drive unowned cats into an already failing pound system.

Usually there is much celebration by cat groups; mandatory desexing means more cats will be desexed, which means less cats will breed, which means less cats will die in shelters! a flawed line of thinking when every single cat impoundment study has shown the majority of cats entering shelters in the state have never had an owner. But people continue to fall for the emotional blackmail put out by Victorian cat groups, feel good when they get their legislation passed and then fail to monitor the ensuing surge in impoundments and killing.

But with cat groups in Victoria suddenly under fire for poor save rates and people starting to question whether they should listen to the strategic thoughts of those who kill thousands of cats each year, groups are not so enthusiastic about speaking out in support of these laws and facing even more heat. So Councils are going it alone. And suddenly, things are getting a lot more honest.

When Wyndham’s deputy mayor spent two days in hospital after being bitten breaking up a cat fight, cats were suddenly back on the Council agenda (interestingly, this councilor had a history of taking in semi-feral strays, so presumably has a lot of compassion for these Community Cats). But with council’s dawn to dusk curfew (that its had since 2006) not reducing the 1200 cats impounded (781 killed) each year, there had been the call for ‘more to be done’.

So Council is now looking at further restrictions, but without the usual song and dance about ‘dead kittens’ from cat welfare groups, it’s much more *ahem* real.

About three local cats are put down daily, council figures show.”

About 1,035 a year (an increase of 25% since mid 2009)

The council said mandatory cat desexing was not the answer, with 95 per cent of Wyndham’s 5,415 registered cats already desexed.

Reflecting the usual findings of Victorian Councils that owned cats aren’t the ‘problem’ in their communities.

Only 55 of the 1100 impounded in 2009-10 were registered.

Confirming that impounded cats overwhelmingly have never had owners, are the offspring of free-roaming cats and wouldn’t be affected by ‘mandatory desexing’ anyway.

And now where it gets really interesting (and this is the bit cat groups usually don’t include in their promotional drives for more cat laws)

Proposed plans to cut stray numbers include more cat-trapping in commercial and industrial areas, and in Werribee’s CBD.

The council said it had trapped more than 100 strays in two days in industrial areas of Laverton North and Hoppers Crossing, and in the CBD.

Residents who have strays on their property can hire a cat trap from the council and take the cat to the city’s pound. The council hires out about 150 traps a year.

So while this council is complaining of high impound and kill rates (what cat groups normally latch onto in support of mandatory desexing laws) they are giving out traps to anyone who wants to target cats for removal, are trapping free-roaming cat colonies and killing them and are removing cats from industrial areas.

Every single thing we know that drives up intakes, completely independent of an ‘irresponsible public’.

But its not all bad in Wyndham; while they trap over 1,000 cats a year and kill the majority of them, it ’supports’ cats in the community by offering desexing; 300 in the last year. But this is only available to people willing to ‘take in their stray’ and doesn’t extend to those animals living without an owner.

We have been hoodwinked by cat groups for long enough. Bad council policy and bad laws are the reason so many cats end up dead in shelters… not the community misbehaving in some way.

There is a solution. But until even one major cat welfare group in Victoria stands up and starts lobbying to protect cats, we are doomed to stay on this merry go round of trapping, killing and unfairly blaming cat owners for the deaths.

After threatening to sack a Director who spoke out about their appalling performance in saving lives, the ironically named Cat Protection Society Victoria did just that.

Ms Alexandra, dumped after a special general meeting on October 18, said the society had become complacent. ”It’s important the general public understands what’s going on,” she said. ”These cats are being killed because of complacency, a lack of effort. I think homes could be found for these cats, certainly more cats than are currently being adopted out.

However, despite killing 11,348 of the 12,491 cats and kittens it received and two more Directors resigning in protest;

… the organisation denies being in turmoil.

I guess the only question I have is HOW CAN YOU NOT BE IN TURMOIL? You absolutely SHOULD be in turmoil! You should be panic stricken, disgusted with the situation you are in and begging ANYONE with an interest in saving, rather than killing cats, to lend a hand. Even if you flat out tried for a terrible result, I don’t think it would be possible to see a worse result than 11,348 cats dead and in landfill, so for it to be the result for“Australia’s Largest Cat Welfare Organisation” it is a failure of epic proportions.

How did they get into this mess? It is a plan we can all choose not to follow. How do they get out of it? Simply, they don’t. When board members are quitting because they can’t make headway and a 90% kill rate doesn’t bring ‘turmoil’ to an organisations management, there is simply no hope for the cats of Victoria.

Remember Cassie Walker, the shelter manager who was advocating for pets in her community? Well, look at their great adoption campaign!

They’re all adorable and they all need a home.

Oh! Makes your heart sing!

The animals at the RSPCA are all vet-checked and desexed and ready to romp about in your garden, sit on your lap and spread the love in your home like only a pet can.

Perhaps there’s room for a new puppy or kitty at your place?

Have a flick through Finda’s gallery and see if there are any cuties that tickle your fancy.

However, it’s always wise to head out the shelter to meet the animals, as Toowoomba’s assistant shelter manager Cassie Walker points out.

“The main thing we tell people is to come out to the shelter and have a look at the animals so we can see what suits them,” Miss Walker said.

Each Thursday, Finda will publish a gallery of dogs and cats available for adoption.

This is either the second or third week they’ve put this together and called on their community to consider adoption. It seems such a no-brainer to have a local newspaper putting out a regular feature of all the available pets, but these kinds of initiatives need commitment and time and the core belief that if the public get to see these pets, that they will be keen to adopt them – all of which can sometimes be hard to find.

We should all be on the lookout for examples like this of groups doing things right! right! right! and take the time to give them the feedback that we appreciate it.

As the owner of a couple of small breeds, meeting a savage dog (or dogs) when I’m out walking is something that plays often in my nightmares. Surely to watch your small dog, a loved family member, be hurt or killed in a dog attack must be one of the worst things a dog lover can live through. Especially if you are an elderly owner and already feeling vulnerable when out in the community. So the story of a Preston grandmother who lost her dog recently to an attack by a pair of roaming huskies was truly moving to anyone who’s ever loved a dog;

A Preston grandmother has accepted Darebin Council’s offer to cremate her west highland terrier after it was killed in a savage dog attack.

May Anderson said she was still recovering from the trauma of last Thursday’s assault on her beloved companion, which occurred in front of her.

The 89-year-old was leaving her Gower St home for a morning walk about 7.40am when two siberian huskies attacked and disembowelled her dog Hamish.

The dogs were seized and impounded and their fate was left in the hands of Council. Three weeks on, an update:

Only one of the two siberian huskies involved in a fatal dog attack in Preston will be euthanised.
…..
Darebin Council city works and development director Michael Ballock said an investigation revealed only the male husky was responsible.

He said the husky’s owner had given consent to euthanise the dog, found roaming in Preston with a bloodied snout.

The female husky would be deemed a menacing dog, requiring it to be muzzled and on a lead in public.

Mr Ballock said the council would not prosecute because destroying one dog was substantial punishment for any pet owner.

While I personally don’t advocate an ‘eye for an eye’ in the case of dog attacks, on the whole this seems like a pretty reasonable response, yes? By all reports the dogs weren’t known to council and hadn’t been known for escaping. The owner was out looking for them and when he found that they were responsible for an attack, complied with council directions allowing the dogs to be impounded. Seems like a pretty horrible incident that could have happend to any dog owner with large breeds who have accidently gotten out.

The council also seems to have taken a very compassionate stance, recognising that this owner has been genuinely affected by the loss of his dogs and the death of Ms Anderson’s Hamish.

We spend an awful lot of time in animal welfare, lobbying for council’s to act in a benevolent way, not to overreact, knee jerk, ban breeds or bring in over the top laws in response to isolated incidents. So surely we would all be congratulating Darebin City Council? Well no…

Dog attack penalties lenient, says RSPCA

RSPCA Victoria animal shelters manager Allie Jalbert said victims suffered when councils didn’t take the cases to court.

“By not prosecuting, the victims in the case are disadvantaged with respect to getting restitution for financial loss or personal suffering,” Ms Jalbert said.

“If (dangerous dog) laws … are meant to act as a deterrent and the council doesn’t prosecute, what sort of deterrent is it?”

Victoria has some of the most draconian dog control legislation in the country with animal control having over-reaching powers to kill pets caught roaming. What kind of deterrent can you possibly be looking to provide, prosecuting to the full extent of the law, a compliant owner whose dogs got out one day?

If the family of the dog who was killed wants to sue for ‘personal suffering’ then they are more than able to. Fines given to dog owners by council aren’t in some way allocated to the victim, but simply go into council coffers. In this case the council has obviously decided there is no benefit to the community in punishing this owner further.

This is the RSPCA for gossake – surely the dog being seized from its family and being killed for its ‘crime’ is enough? Where is the compassion?

We have bad laws in Victoria. And with animal welfare groups sensationalising and baying for blood, it’s really no suprise.

What happens to the performance of an organisation when the culture is not one of hope and potential, but the absolute conviction that failure is the only option?

‘We know we can’t succeed.’

What if your role in the community is one where lives depend on you – like a nurse, or a policeman, or an air traffic controller – and rather than working to constantly improve outcomes, if the leaders of the organisation instead work to justify poor performance?

‘Sorry you’ve ended up needing our help, but we won’t try and help you because we know we can’t succeed.’

What if the industry is one where once a year it gets really busy – hellishly busy in fact – like retail or travel agents or those Christmas holiday tourist towns; would it be ok to accept defeat then?

‘Thanks for coming just like we knew you would, but we’re not going to set up programs to try accommodate you because we know we can’t succeed’

And what would happen to the communities regard for us, if we took the message of failure to the media and made it our slogan;

‘Hi, I’m Michelle and I know I cannot succeed today, and I have no plans to try and succeed tomorrow and I believe I will probably continue to fail until the new year.’

It’s not hard to see that any organisation needs to nurture a culture that celebrates success. Especially where lives depended on it or if it gets hellishly busy once a year. Management have a responsibility to be driving a strategy to lead the organisation to improved outcomes. By contrast, sending out a pre-emptive message of failure would be the death knell of the organisation, as setting the mindset of both employees and the community to ‘FAIL’ would doom you to reduced capabilty, decreased job satisfaction and almost assured non-performance.

And yet, we don’t only accept, we almost expect this kind of defeatist behaviour from pounds heading into the summer holidays.

The tragic aftermath of cat breeding season will be played out in Gladstone in coming months.

If last year’s figures are anything to go by, up to 100 pregnant cats and unwanted kittens are expected to be dumped at Gladstone pound between November and January next year. Sadly, a large percentage of these will be euthanised.

And the sad truth is it happens every year.

….

A sobering true statement, according to Gladstone Regional Council Local Law Enforcement coordinator Sarah Kummerow.

Ms Kummerow said each year around the Christmas period there was an increase in cat impoundment numbers.

Likewise, many cats are being trapped by community members sick of them roaming the streets and making a nuisance of themselves.

She said the sad thing is a majority of cats get euthanised because people don’t want to come forward and collect them.

“It is much harder to re-home an adult cat than a dog,” Ms Kummerow said.

“People aren’t going to be wanting to adopt a cat – it’s a sad fact of life.

Really? Because there are lots of examples across the world where people didn’t only want to adopt one cat, but hundreds of people adopted hundreds of cats, when organisations took the time to reach out to them.

The truth isn’t “cats get euthanised because people don’t want to come forward and collect them”, the truth is cats get ‘euthanised’ because pounds don’t work on finding solutions OTHER than killing them. By placing the blame on the community rather than setting a plan to improve outcomes for these animals ensures the same result is seen year to year.

Sure, it takes a lot of work to get adult cats into homes, get the media to take notice, to make a result other than the almost certain death for these animals, but saving them becomes our job when we choose to accept them into our care.

What’s more, Gladstone have identified their problems up front and could be working to address each one of these in turn;

- Too many undesexed cats? Hit the issue head on, before it even begins; give every low income earner and pensioner in your community free cat desexing. Target areas where cats are known to be prolific and go door to door offering free cat desexing.

- Too many unowned cats being impounded by enthusastic community members? Stop giving cat haters traps. Stop accepting cats that are feral and have no hope of becoming someones pet. Instead agree only to desex the cat and return it to its home. Stop telling people to bring healthy, free-roaming cats to you if all you can offer them is death.

- Not enough adoptions? 100 cats over three months is about 33 a month – one a day. Host a cat only adoption event. Run a senior cats for seniors program. Get all your kittens into a pet shop. Open your shelter until after 7pm all the way through January. Put your cats on the web with nice photos. Promote ‘barn cat’ adoptions. Use the ‘big fun guide to saving cats’ to plan the next three months.

Advertise what you need your community to do to achieve success rather than squandering media opportunities by promoting your plans to fail. Creating a organisational culture which thrives on success doesn’t just happen, it has to be cultivated, planned and nutured. And without a culture of success these animals have no hope.