Year of the Cat brings about nationwide cat campaign

By David Archibald

The Guardian

This is the Year of the Cat, according to the Vietnamese calender, and a network of Canadian cat welfare advocates are honouring the year with a nationwide awareness campaign.

Care for Cats is a collaborative effort to bring the major problems facing cats to the attention of the public.

Started by a Hamilton, Ont. feline practitioner, Elizabeth O’Brien, the initiative seeks to deliver its message through events and theme months.

Veterinarian Anne Marie Carey, from the Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown, works with spay and neuter programs across Prince Edward Island to combat cat overpopulation and has been providing O’Brien with information from her research.

She said that while the work she has done has greatly improved cat welfare on the Island, the best way to attack the issue is by raising awareness.

“There is one the thing that fixes cat overpopulation problems and that’s public education,” said Carey. “That’s something we haven’t targeted as much in the past.”

On top of three nationwide theme months in May, September and December, Carey is currently working on plans to host her own public education events at the AVC.

For now, she continues to work with Island groups like the non-profit volunteer organization Cat Action Team, to improve the methods of feral cat reduction.

“There’s a lot of arguments about what the best solutions really are,” said Carey. “I still stand by the trap, neuter and return method (TNR) where the cats are humanely trapped, neutered and then returned to where they were found.

“While it takes a lot of resources and is very labour intensive, it’s certainly a lot better from a public perspective and from a welfare perspective than things like trap and kill programs. I don’t like those.”

In the past, the Cat Action Team has coordinated the campaigns to neuter the stray cats by collecting them, bringing them to clinics like the AVC and returning them after a day of recovery.

Now the AVC is getting more involved with co-ordinating and educating the volunteers.

Meghan Solc, a third year vet student, has been hired as the TNR coordinator for the AVC and is becoming more involved in the organizing and collecting of the cats and following up on the cats after they have been returned.

“She’s actually contacting people who own the barns or look after the colonies the cats came from to see if there’s been any issues with them post-operatively,” said Casey.

“We’ve had very few problems. Part of it I’m sure is attributed to the amount of monitoring that we do and the way that we do our procedures.”