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Public Petitions Committee 07 December 2017

07 Dec 2017 · S5 · Public Petitions Committee

Item of business

New Petitions

Cat Population (Management) (PE1674)

Ellie Stirling Watch on SPTV

When I did the research earlier this year, I was also quite stunned to find that definition. Because cats, dogs and farmed animals are all classified as non-native species, that general term “under human control” is applied to them all. Farm stock, horses and other sorts of kept animals can be fenced in as a simple way of keeping them under human control. If you kept a horse and a tree fell down and broke the fencing and the horse escaped, under the legislation and the code of practice, you might be open to criminal prosecution for not maintaining your fencing or not checking it. Because it is a strict liability offence, the responsibility would be on you to demonstrate that you had checked the fence the day before and it was perfectly all right, but there was a storm overnight. With dogs, there is human control involving leads, training and what have you; with cats, as Michelle Ballantyne alluded to, it is different. Everyone who has read my petition has said to me—front-line, war-weary cat rescue volunteers all say this, too—that cats are not under human control in the way that dogs are. You cannot just call them and expect that they will come back. Only a few cats are under human control in that way. Cat behaviour varies along a continuum. There are welfare issues, whereby cats cannot legally be contained in the way that a horse can be contained. Cats cannot be fenced or shut in—if they were, that would rightly be a welfare issue. For me, for veterinary professionals and for conservationists, as well as for cat owners—or 90 per cent of them, at least—the middle-of-the-road solution is neutering, because if a cat is neutered, it will be free of hormonally driven behaviour, such as wandering, roaming and territorial fighting, which leads to the transmission of disease. For female cats, neutering will free them from producing two to three litters a year of five kittens each, which is a ticket to early death as well as to not coming back, because cats move out and colonise new areas when they produce young. I have suggested a simple change to the definition of “under human control” in the code of practice. Instead of saying that animals that are under human control are “expected to return”, which is a subjective judgment, the definition should be objective and pragmatic and should relate to something that can be observed, touched, felt or measured. It would be sensible for the definition of a cat that is “under human control” to be a cat that is neutered. If a cat is neutered, that will satisfy the vast majority of cat lovers, every vet professional and every member of the public who does not like cats—people who do not like cats do not want to have 60 living next door to them. It seems to be a middle-of-the-road requirement to have a cat neutered. That way, it would be regarded as being under human control.

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Public Petitions Committee 07 December 2017

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