Better to solve cat problem with education than punishment - bird advocate

A birdsong advocate is welcoming Ashburton District Council's plans to bring in new obligations for cat owners.

The council is looking at requiring cats over four months old to be microchipped, registered and desexed.

Methven and Foothills Birdsong Initiative spokesperson Mac McElwain likes the council's educational approach. He says it will be more effective in the long-term if people decide to make the change themselves.

"They've put out a discussion document taking an educational approach rather than a mandatory approach - which I think is smart.

"[It] says if you've got a cat at home it should be desexed, it should be chipped, and that chipping should be registered on the national register. And they've also said if you get cats around you that you don't own, don't feed them, please."

SPCA senior scientific officer Christine Sumner told Local Democracy reporting the organisation - which took in an average of 20,000 cats and kittens each year - supported the changes.

"Desexing has welfare benefits for a cat but importantly it helps reduce the number of cats and kittens that need our help each year."

McElwain said it could be a 50-year project.

"My experience of people is if you tell them to do something, they might do it in the short-term, but they very quickly get back to what they used to do.

"But if they make the decision themselves that they need to change, then that's actually more effective in the long term. So I like the notion of collaboration rather than mandatory behaviour."

But whether birds could withstand another half-century of being preyed on by cats was not clear.

"There's some trapping we can do to get rid of the usual suspects, which, you know, possums and hedgehogs and rats and mice, stoats and weasels and those kinds of things.

"But currently, up until yesterday when the council made this decision, we didn't really have a plan about cats. And the awful reality is that cats do a monumental amount of damage to bird life.

"If you suppose there's probably a couple of million cats in the country, just suppose each one of them kills one bird a week, and they probably do a lot more than that. That's 2 million a week, which comes out to 100 million birds a year, and no population can stand that."