Property squeeze bad for cat lovers

CEO of the Newtown’s Cat Protection shelter, Kristina Vesk, says uncertainty about the future has seen an increase in the number of cats seeking homes.

“We usually have a waiting list for surrenders and although we continue to re-home several hundred cats a year, last year we experienced a 20 per cent fall in adoptions,” she said.

“We think that is largely attributable to the lack of pet-friendly accommodation combined with an uncertain economic climate.”

Located at Enmore Road in Newtown, the society started in 1958 as a group of volunteers concerned about local street cats.  The society moved to the larger Newtown premises in the late 1970s and the building was renovated into a special purpose cat shelter in 2004.

Although services such as the RSPCA also work hard to assist stray or unwanted animals Ms Vesk said the Cat Protection Shelter is different on several key points.

“Cat Protection is the only feline-only shelter in Sydney – we’re the cat specialists,” she said.

“We are a no-kill shelter so cats stay with us until they find their forever home, but this also means we are limited admission so if people want to surrender a cat to us they have to book in and bring their cat when we have a vacancy.”

The RSPCA re-homed almost 20 thousand cats during 2008-2009 but was also forced to euthanize more than half of the cats they received with 3,909 being euthanized in NSW alone because of the lack of willing homes.

Earlier this year Lord Mayor Clover Moore was at the launch for a book entirely about the challenges of metropolitan pet ownership, ‘Pets in the City’.

The book, which is available for free download at www.petsinthecity.net.au, details the issues facing pet owners and contains a lengthy segment on overcoming pet permissibility issues.

A survey conducted by the book’s authors found 67 per cent of non-pet owners (people that did not have a cat or dog but wanted one) couldn’t have an animal due to housing limitations.

“It’s hard to understand why pets are so often banned from strata and rental premises,” the book states.

“Pet-friendly developments tend to report minimal pet-related problems, and pet owners are shown to make excellent, responsible and reliable long-term tenants.”

Ms Vesk said some owners would even decline to choose a property because of this issue.

“Earlier this year a couple did adopt their own cat,” she said.

“They’d been unable to find pet-friendly accommodation when forced to move from their rental property…after a short while, however, they chose to break their new lease and move several suburbs away to a pet-friendly rental: they missed their cat too much.”

You can find out more about the Cat Protection Society at http://www.catprotection.org.au/