Transcript
Gemma: All our different stakeholders have the same goal. We all want to see these cats have good lives. We want to see them in permanent homes where they're safe and we don't want the unplanned breeding to continue to go, so really, all of us want to get those cats off the streets and into homes.
Brian: Hello and welcome to RSPCA Australia's Great and Small Talk, where we discuss the pressing welfare issues animals face in Australia. I'm Brian Daly, and today we're talking about cats, and in particular, the management of stray cats in Australia. And most appropriately, I am joined by the Project Manager of Keeping Cats Safe at Home, and Community Veterinarian at RSPCA New South Wales, Dr Gemma Ma. Welcome to the podcast, Gemma.
Gemma: Thanks for having me.
Brian: There's a lot of discussion about how to effectively manage cats in Australia at the moment, for many reasons, including safeguarding our native wildlife. A big part of that conversation is about how to manage stray cats. So firstly, Gemma, can you talk us through what a stray cat actually is?
Gemma: Actually all cats in Australia belong to the same species, but we can divide them into a few different population groups based on their relationships with people. So we've got feral cats who are living as wild animals out in the bush with no relationship with or dependence on humans. And then we've got owned pet cats, which is self explanatory, they live in our families. They're identified with and cared for by an individual or a household, and then we have these stray cats in between. So actually, when we're talking about cat management, we tend to call these cats "unowned cats", and they have some degree of relationship with or dependence on humans. They're getting food or care from people, whether directly and deliberately or indirectly, like eating out of people's bins, and they're a really important group. It's a relatively small population compared to those feral cats and the owned cats, but really important because they they interact with those other populations in important ways.
Brian: And what are some of the welfare risks these cats face?
Gemma: Yeah, they can have really quite difficult lives, actually. They face a lot of risks. They're obviously out in the open, often in quite urban or built-up areas, living around people, so quite at risk of being hit by cars, being attacked by dogs, getting in fights with other cats. They can also, because they're often reproductively active, and they're getting fed extra foods. They often have quite high reproductive success. They have lots of kittens. So often they're living at quite high densities, which leads to high rates of infectious diseases and quite a lot of suffering because of that. So they can have quite difficult lives.
Brian: You say the the population of stray cats isn't as big as the domestic or the feral, but it's still quite a sizeable amount. Why are there so many? Is it because of the reproduction?
Gemma: Yeah, there's a couple of factors. I mean, the main ... probably one of the big, important ones, is that they're quite prolific breeders, cats. So a female cat can have three litters a year, if they're getting a lot of food, and they can have, you know, up to four or five kittens in a litter. So they can end up ... the populations can grow really quickly. We see it a lot in the field that someone will have one stray queen female cat turn up, and within two seasons, they've got about 50 cats, because that first cat has had a couple of litters, and those kittens have gone on to have litters of their own. So you get these hugely, exponentially growing populations where they're being fed. So that's one factor, is that they breed prolifically, but the other factor is a lack of services. So often there just aren't services available for these cats. If you have a stray cat show up, there's often nowhere for that cat to go, and no one you can ask for help. People often say they've called the council, or council says, sorry, we can't do anything about it. Rescue organisations and shelters are full of cats, so there's often nowhere for the cats to go and desexing services, so interventions to prevent the cats from breeding can be too expensive and difficult for people to access as well, so prolific breeding combined with difficulty accessing services.
Brian: We have one here that runs away very quickly from us.
Gemma: Yeah, absolutely. That can be another factor with the cats, who aren't socialised, they're not used to being handled by people. They can be really hard to catch. You often don't even know they're there.
Brian: You mentioned that they get fed or ... what's their relationship? How are people involved?
Gemma: So what we've found in our work in the field and also through research, it seems that when an unowned cat shows up in an area for whatever reason, they're fairly quickly noticed by the people in the surrounding area and and provided with food. People feed them because they care about them, but they notice that they're hungry, they're suffering, and they want to do something to help. So most of the cats, the unowned cats, are being cared for deliberately by someone. We refer to these people as "semi owners", and that's really important, because there are people that we can work with here. I think in traditional thoughts on cat management, those semi owners have been considered ... it's like they're the problem, and that leads to quite widespread advice that I still hear of, just stop feeding them. Just don't feed stray cats, which really doesn't solve the problem. The semi owners are not the reasons the cats were there in the first place. And actually they're just doing compassionate, humane things that we actually want to encourage people to do, to notice animal suffering and to act to prevent the suffering. So we see these semi owners as a real resource, and people we want to support and equip with the resources that they need to solve the problems. If we talk about how other ways that people are involved, often, well, always, people are involved in why the cats are there in the first place, either they're providing resources for the cats in terms of food, like leaving bins uncovered or putting food out for cats to eat. So they're providing that resource that attracts the cats in the first place. Often cats are abandoned, and that can contribute to these unowned cat populations, which again, usually reflects the inaccessibility of the services. There's nowhere for people to surrender the cats if they can't keep them anymore. It's hard to get them desexed to prevent the unplanned litters that are often abandoned. So people are involved in a whole range of different ways. It kind of all comes back to human behaviour in the end.
Brian: And can you talk us through some of the ways that this issue can be addressed? You talk about the lack of services, but who are the stakeholders involved?
Gemma: Yeah, so we've been working on this through a project at RSPCA New South Wales. We're very fortunate to receive a large grant from the New South Wales Government through their environmental trust to try out approaches to ... to cat management using a human behaviour change approach. So we've tried to look at it really holistically and work from a number of different angles. We recognise that the unowned cats were an issue, and we've implemented targeted desexing programs to prevent them from breeding and to try and reduce their numbers over time. So the important stakeholders that we've been working with are the local councils who often receive complaints about the cats from the community, so they often know where they are, so they can really help us find where we need to target and we've also worked really closely with a whole bunch of local vet practices who have helped us provide those desexing surgeries so we can make the desexing accessible for people.
Brian: Where should this management of unowned, semi owned cats reside? With one entity? Or, as you say, is it a holistic collaborative approach?
Gemma: We definitely find a holistic collaborative approach is the most effective, so unowned cat management. It's most effective when the whole community gets involved. And we see this actually happen on its own with no intervention in higher socio-economic areas, where people they experience less of the barriers to accessing veterinary services and finding homes for the cats. You know, we'll see this in our neighborhoods, where a stray cat or a stray kitten turns up in someone's yard or at their workplace, and people just get together and they get the cat desexed, and they talk to their networks, and they find a home for the cat. It's how a lot of us in the community found our cat family members in the first place. I mean, the statistics shows us that about half of all the pet cats in Australia were were acquired that way, for cats that just needed a home. So you know, the community can do this, and they do do this where they can, we just need to provide access to those services. So accessible surrender, when a cat turns up, or a kitten turns up that doesn't have a home, that we have somewhere for that cat to go, where we can find a solution. So ideally, find them home, and also accessible desexing, so we can prevent those unplanned litters being born from people's owned cats. And act when we notice an unowned cat. We get it desexed straight away. We make sure it's got a solution.
Brian: Many years ago, a very, very pregnant cat turned up on our doorstep and adopted us and ... and had her litter in a construction zone across the road from us, of three kittens that we end up keeping one of those kittens, finding homes for the other two and getting the mother desexed after that.
Gemma: Yeah, exactly. It's a great illustration of exactly how this happens. And most people have a story of themselves where they've found a cat in that way.
Brian: This cat that we found was obviously very socialised. But for those that aren't socialised, can the others be transitioned into companion cats as well?
Gemma: It's very individual. So cats are individuals, just like we are, and their needs vary quite significantly. So often, yes, they can be integrated into into families and they can become great companions. That doesn't necessarily mean they want to be touched or picked up. And some might be really happy living inside your house and having a warm bed and you know, places to escape from the cold, and others might not. It just really depends. I guess the key is to treat each cat as an individual. Let them take it at their own pace. And make sure you're meeting all of their needs. Give them that option to come inside if they want to. But what we find is if these unsocialised cats, the best way to manage them is to leave them where they are, manage them in situ, get them desexed. Make sure they're getting provided with all the care that they need, so food and vet treatment and shelter and all those things, and let them take their own time to become socialised or not. But, you know, make sure they're safe, make sure all their needs are being met.
Brian: And what can cat guardians and caregivers do to be responsible?
Gemma: Yeah, I think the best thing, the most important thing we can do to be good caregivers and good guardians of our cats, is to learn about cat behaviour and cat body language, how cats communicate. They're really different to us as a species, and they have very different needs, and they communicate in really different ways. They're not dogs either. They're very different to dogs too. So the more we can learn about their behaviour, the ways they communicate, the better we can meet their needs. I guess the simple things are, make sure your cats are desexed by four months. So traditionally, the the advice was, was a bit older than that, but now we're saying, get them done early. Get them done before they they sexually mature, because we want to prevent those unplanned litters. They can start breeding from about five months of age. So four months is a perfect time to get them done. They make much better pets when they're desexed, and obviously it prevents those unplanned litters. We recommend getting cats microchipped and registered with the council that keeps them safe if they ever go missing. It helps you get them back again. And we also recommend preventing cats from roaming away from your home to keep them safe, mainly, unfortunately, at our shelters and our vet clinics, we see so many cats who are injured or killed in accidents, things like being hit by cars, attacked by dogs, in fights with other cats. So cats are much safer if we can keep them at home. And we have heaps of resources on our RSPCA New South Wales website and on the RSPCA Australia website on how to do that, how to meet all your cat's needs. So lots of information out there, if you want to learn more.
Brian: In other areas around the world, organisations employ trap neuter return strategy, or TNR strategy to try and reduce stray cat populations. Is this a strategy that RSPCA looks to employ as well?
Gemma: Yeah, trap neuter return are common style of programs that are used to manage unowned cat populations overseas. It's a very common way of managing these populations where unsocialised cats are trapped, they're desexed and they're returned to the colonies. There are some limitations to that approach and some some potential welfare implications that we're a bit concerned about. So we think all cats should have a caregiver who's committed to providing ongoing care for the cat. So if a cat's going to be desexed and returned to a site, they need someone who's going to look after them for the long term. And also, we've taken a more holistic approach. So instead of just desexing those unowned cats, we're taking a human behaviour change approach, so trying to work with the caregivers of the cat, trying to find all the people who are feeding them, working with them, also understanding how those cats ended up being there in the first place, and trying to intervene to prevent those situations happening again. So we've taken some of the aspects of TNR that's done overseas in our targeted desexing programs that are good, so working with those unowned cats, trapping them, getting them desexed. But we've also added on extra components that make it better for the cats and also have more of a long term behaviour change approach. So what we do is we go into an area where we know there's unowned cats, we talk to everyone involved, we talk to the council, we talk to all the neighbors. We try and find out who's ... who's the primary carer of these unowned cats. Usually there's multiple people. It's not just one person. We want to find them all. We want to get everybody on the team, everybody working together. We work together to find the person who's going to be the owner of those cats. So that might be the person who lives there. It might be a volunteer or a rescue group who come in and feed the cats every day. It kind of doesn't matter, as long as the cats are getting looked after. They're getting looked after every day, and someone's going to get those cats vet treatment if they need it in the future. And we also want to work with that neighborhood as well, because if those cats are there because they've been abandoned when people have had an unplanned litter from their own cats, we want to make sure that desexing is accessible, that information is accessible so people know about the benefits of desexing, that services are available, when to get the cats done, all of those things, so we can tackle it in a more holistic way, prevent the causes of those unowned populations in the first place, not just desex and return.
Brian: And as you say, the ... these people that are caring for them are really great stakeholders, because they they have socialised these cats
Gemma: Exactly. They're such a resource, especially when you're talking about unsocialised, unowned cats. They're really like they can be hard just to find. You don't always know they're there until the neighbors are complaining about the noise and the poo and the nuisance. But otherwise, they can be hard, really hard to catch. You've got to be out there at night. You've got to be out there monitoring traps. You've got to be doing that day after day, building the relationship, building the trust with the cats, councils don't have the resources to do that. Animal welfare organisations don't have the resources. We really rely on these semi owners, the people who are out there, building the relationships, taking the time, they're there on the ground. They're a huge untapped resource. They're working their hardest. They really care about the welfare of the cats. And ultimately, we, kind of all of us, all our different stakeholders, have the same goal. We all want to see these cats have good lives. We want to see them in permanent homes where they're safe and we don't want the unplanned breeding to continue to go, so really, all of us want to get those cats off the streets and into homes.
Brian: Thanks so much for your time today, Gemma, it's been fascinating talking about this and hearing about such a holistic approach to addressing this issue, and to keep these cats safe, as you say, so they're better off. The environment is better off, and the community is better off by approaching this in this way. And I really appreciate your time for taking us through all those points that the RSPCA and you're working on with this. Thanks again for your time.
Gemma: Thanks for having me.
Brian: We've been talking today with Dr Gemma Ma, Project Manager Keeping Cats Safe at Home, and Community Veterinarian at RSPCA New South Wales. And thank you for listening. If you would like any more information on management of stray cats, you can visit the RSPCA website at rspca.org.au. You can also subscribe to the podcast series at the website, or all the usual podcast suspects. I'm Brian Daly, and I look forward to your company next time on RSPCA Australia's Great and Small Talk.
