Can I have my Cats with Chips Please?
First let me say I do not hate cats, how people every reached that conclusion is only for them to know. What I do not
like however is the evidenced damage cats are doing to our native fauna. To Bob Kerridge and his fellow travellers I
fully appreciate and respect your love for the domestic cat. That is not the issue and totally beside the point. Stray
and feral cats originate from the domestic cat population so your constituency is responsible for that population as
well.
Along with other introduced species including weasels, stoats, rats and mice the assault on our wildlife has got to
stop. We cannot claim we are conservationists and justify pouring money into protecting and enhancing our environment
when we willingly allow any of those species to wreak havoc. The hypocrisy of double standards is for those who hold
them to justify.
Today Bob raised the SPCA’s little known Trap Neuter Release (TNR) policy. This despicable practice means that stray
cats are no longer put down by the SPCA as they once were, but instead neutered and released into colonies where they
can continue to kill wildlife unabated; simply neutering a cat does nothing to stop the bloodlust. These stray cats are
a nuisance to society and themselves as they carry disease, intermingle with ferals and ultimately lead miserable lives.
To make matters worse these colonies are fed, which attracts new cats and ensures their population keeps rising despite
the de-sexing policy. In short TNR is an expensive failure – it leads to more stray cats, especially as people avoid the
cost of neutering.
Bob has asked me for money for the SPCA. I will help his neutering and chipping programme but not until he abandons his
discredited TNR policy and joins me in advocating that people that do this should be prosecuted along with those that
allow their cat to stray on my property.
Domestic cats should be controlled. Cat owners have no right to allow their animals to wander across my property and
slaughter wildlife. Incredibly, from the mail I’ve received, too many cat owners do think this is their right.
Containing cats within the owner’s property is the minimum of responsibility cat owners need to accept. Even then their
animal can still slaughter passing birdlife, but that is for the cat-owner to defend to society.
Local councils have been laggards in this space and need to step up their vigilance. You cannot justify spending
ratepayers money on the one hand on ecological reserves while on the other you don’t hold cat owners to account. I would
like to see New Zealanders acknowledging that the environment is important to them and walking the walk on this, not
simply paying lip service to the sentiment. To that end you should be cage-trapping cats that wander across your
property, boxing them and delivering them to the local Mayor’s office for them to deal with. Council need to urgently
bring down bylaws that force cat owners to register, micro-chip and neuter their cats, impose fines on cat-owners that
need to retrieve their cats from the local Pound and euthanize unclaimed cats.
Arguably the greatest economic opportunity New Zealand has is the monetisation of its natural capital. I am writing this
from Lanzhou, the most polluted city in the world where the natural environment has been totally ruined by a blatant
disregard of the value of environmental capital. Citizens wear masks, many are dying from the impact of air pollution
and smoking, and the wildlife is non-existent, the biodiversity severely compromised. People here look at what we have
in New Zealand with intense envy. We are sitting on a goldmine.
As the late Sir Paul Callaghan said to me in his dying days – “you have got to do something to awaken New Zealanders
awareness on just how important our environment is. I am relying on you to promote Pest-Free New Zealand”. To which I
said, “thanks Paul for that hospital pass”. Some of you will know that Sir Paul had twigged to the economic potential of
our environment when he coined that phrase about “making New Zealand a place where talent wants to live”. This, I’d
suggest to you is the greatest economic opportunity New Zealand faces – to capitalise on the destroyed environments
elsewhere, make ours better and better and from that encourage not just tourism but also quality immigration.
What I am asking is for New Zealanders to enforce accountability on cat ownership and for those owners who cannot
confine their cat 24 hours a day to either face the consequences or to make this cat their last because the unintended
consequences of cat ownership are too harmful. In terms of what people can do about rats and mice once this cat
population is confined, we do of course have the mousetrap.
Finally I want the SPCA to dump TNR. Not only is this practice open to legal challenge as cruelty to animals, but its
violation of the Biosecurity and Wildlife Acts is well worth pursuing. Any lawyers out there want to give Bob Cat a run
for his money on this then join the team (sorry I couldn’t avoid the pun). The Society for the Protection of Cats (SPCA)
needs to take a long hard look at itself in the mirror.
Dr Gareth Morgan