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Good, should be enforced world wide.
Along with mandatory spay/neuter. Make it a crime to intentionally avoid spaying and neutering cats and dogs.
Oh, you’re a breeder? I used to work at a no kill animal shelter. You’re the bane of my, and every stray animal’s, existence. FUCK animal breeders.
Are you confusing ‘breeder’ with ‘pet mill’? Ghetto breeding was horrible to my family involved in animal care and salvation. Actual breeders, though, not so much.
I’m talking about anyone who intentionally takes an unneutered male animal and an unspayed female animal and intentionally puts them together to make and sell babies. Especially inbreeders. The only purebred animal that I can accept is sheepdogs, because they aren’t bred for looks, they’re bred for intelligence.
I mean, if such a campaign is ever completely successful, along with one for capturing or fixing stray and feral animals, there would need to be some amount of breeding of them or they’d eventually go extinct. Perhaps with regulation on both practices that lead to unnecessary health problems (like inbreeding or breeding for harmful traits like squashed faces) and on numbers to avoid breeding more of a specific sort of animal than there exists demand for.
I mean, there’s responsible breading and irresponsible breeding. My mum has always kept setters of both the Irish and English varieties. The breeders she gets them aren’t just pumping endless dogs out for profit, they’re taking good care of the bitches.
Unless the shelters in your area are consistently well below capacity, it’s still incredibly immoral
Good luck getting the UK on board, something like 90% of cats are outdoor cats here
Domestic cats have been in the UK for ~2000 years, and wildcats for >~8000 years.
Their only real predators in the UK are cars and dogs, and most British bird species are well acquainted with cats, and on the whole aren’t at high risk. Recommendations say an outdoor cat is a healthy, happy cat.
The RSPB (bird conservation charity) doesn’t find them a major problem here, but do recommend:
- Neuter them
- Keep them in at dawn, dusk & night
- If they ever kill a bird, put a bell or beeper on the collar
Which seems a reasonable set of recommendations.
On the other hand, the USA and Australia don’t have the thousands of years of history of cats as part of the ecosystem, and they have all these wild dog-type-things and snappy reptile things etc, so the cats are in more danger, and the native bird species are at higher risk. Recommendations say an outdoor cat is a bird-murdering machine that’s about to get run over by a giant SUV and then eaten by drop-bears.
My Eastern European neighbours think it’s weird that we let the cats inside at all. They think they should live entirely outside.
So I guess “different countries, different rules”.
From a UK perspective, it seems unbelievably cruel to keep a cat locked indoors. The hunting instinct is one of a cat’s main drives, so to take that away is equivalent to removing sleep or food. I understand the issues around cats and wildlife in other countries, but I think the solution is to just not have domestic cats rather than trying to imprison them.
I think the solution is to just not have domestic cats rather than trying to imprison them.
I agree, it’s a cruel to keep a cat indoors than to put a goldfish in a very small bowl or feeding an animal vegan food. Unpopular opinion, seeing how fond people are about their furry killers, but it’s the only real way to remedy this problem.