J Rees

I would like to sympathise with Neil Ericksen, Policy sought over cat plague, Ōpōtiki News, February 5, as we had a similar problem with visiting cats after our dog died.

They didn’t appear to be strays and looked well-fed, some wore collars, but they preferred our garden to their own.

We watched them to see where they were getting in and put our prickly cuttings and branches along the fence lines, together with a temporary loose netting fence to make access difficult.

We found their favourite sleeping places and left strong smelling substances and more prickles there to discourage them.

There is still the occasional cat passing through, but they do not stay.

It would have made no difference whether these cats were microchipped or not.

We do not know if any of the cats pictured were microchipped, or what happened to the cats that were trapped.

If they were taken to OSCA, they would have been re-homed after being microchipped but would still be free to roam. If trapped by council, I presume the plan would be to have them euthanised at the ratepayers’ expense?  

Regarding the suggestion that homeless cats should not be fed on non-residential properties, surely this actually encourages them to live away from houses where they are a nuisance? Isn’t that a good thing?

A female cat can potentially produce 12 kittens a year. The females from that litter can themselves breed after four months, meaning 144 new cats in a year. If half of the new kittens are female that would give us 72 new breeding animals, each producing a further 12 kittens each over the breeding season, and so on ... The figures are scary, but I do not see stray cats in these numbers around town. This must be due to the efforts of OSCA and the compassionate people in town who feed and de-sex the strays out of their own pockets.

I think we owe them a big vote of thanks.

In the long term, if all cats in town are de-sexed there will be no more cats in Ōpōtiki, the same would apply to puppies. Do we really want to live in a society free of companion pets?