By Stuart Viney u5955036

Romeo has gone roam about in Straithnairn!

He’s been on a suburban stroll, searching for his star-crossed lover, Juliet. But there never has been a tale of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo, for Juliet has been locked up in the castle that is Canberra’s cat containment laws. In fact, Romeo should have been locked away in that castle too, but this feline game of find and seek highlights the issue of compliance in Canberra’s cat containment laws.

What is cat containment?

As part of the ACT Cat Plan 2021 – 2031, across the entire ACT, all cats born after July 1 2022 are required to be kept on their owner’s premises 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In newer suburbs, including Straithnairn, this rule applies to all cats, regardless of their age.

Why do we need cat containment?

The ACT Cat Plan recognizes that while cats are often thought of as pets, they are also considered a pest species. Cats are known to become predators of a litany of native species. It’s estimated that the Canberra cat population can kill over 100000 native birds, small mammals, reptiles, and frogs each year. Across Australia, feral cats pose a risk to 142 threatened species. In all likelihood, Romeo isn’t hungry for love, he’s just plain hungry, and I bet that a critically endangered regent honeyeater (Xanthomyza Phrygia)would be the perfect sized meal for him.

So clearly something needed to be done about Canberra’s cat concerns. Eradication of Canberra’s cat population would be completely infeasible in terms of logistics and community backlash. Instead, containment was deemed the most realistic management option, and the most likely to produce positive outcomes for the threatened species which the ACT government is trying to protect.

How can cat containment be improved?

The troubling thing about Romeo’s missing poster, aside from missing the perfect opportunity to quote the play which he was named after, is that it was found in Straithnairn, a cat containment suburb. There should not be any posters for missing cats in cat containment suburbs because there should not be any opportunities for a cat to go missing! It shows that cat owners are either ignoring the containment laws, or unable to properly abide by them. The current response to breaches of containment is through education, or failing that, a measly $300 fine.

But Romeo is not alone in escaping the confines of containment, each year the ACT RSPCA takes in over 700 lost cats, and those are just the escapees which were found. That might give Romeo hope that his romantic getaway might result in reuniting him with Juliet, but it also shows that the current compliance measures are not enough.

The time for education is over! It is time for a plague of penalties to be prescribed upon the houses which cannot contain these cats. Strict and significant fines should apply protect the native species which are suffering. All pet cats in the ACT must already be micro-chipped, so tracking down the owners of a found feline should not be difficult. I propose that there should be a ransom of at least $1000 for the return of any lost cats which have been found after breaching the compliance laws. If the ransom cannot be paid then the found cats will become fortune’s fool, and be destroyed. Money from this ransom could be used to fund conservation actions for the species which are threatened by feral cats. This would only penalize the owners of lost cats which have been recovered, however the threat of financial or emotional harm coming from allowing cats like Romeo to go roam about should elicit greater containment compliance from Canberra’s cat owners.

References

Barratt, D.G. (1998). Predation by house cats, Felis catus (L.), in Canberra, Australia. II. Factors affecting the amount of prey caught and estimates of the impact on wildlife. Wildlife Research, 25(5), p.475. doi:10.1071/wr97026.

City Services (n.d.). Cat containment. [online] ACT City Services. Available at: https://www.cityservices.act.gov.au/pets-and-wildlife/domestic-animals/cats/cat-containment.

Department of the Environment (2015). Threat abatement plan for predation by feral cats. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.

Environment, Planning, and Sustainable Development Directorate (2021). ACT Cat Plan 2021-2031. Canberra: ACT Government.

RSPCA ACT (2021). Annual Outcomes Report 2020/2021. Canberra: RSPCA.