Over the past 10 years, Sarah’s* two-bedroom ground-floor apartment in Sydney has become something of a haven for stray cats.
“I’ve got six at the moment,” she tells Guardian Australia. “Only one of them was a tame homeless cat.” All the others were unsocialised strays. “One of my latest ones, I’ve had him for two years, and he was about 10 when I met him [and] in a really bad way.”
When Bluey turned up in her garden he was very sick and antisocial. Teeth rotting and unable to hunt, he was attracted by the food Sarah left out for her other cats. “He was very cheekily coming into the kitchen and stealing the food when the back door was open. So then I just started giving him food for himself.”
When strays turn up at Sarah’s house, she traps them and takes them to a vet for desexing and treatment. If she can find a home for them, she will. Often, though, her only option is to let them back out where she found them. “I’ll feed them if I see them, but I won’t treat them as my cat,” she says.
Bluey, though, stuck around. Now, Sarah says, he’s calmed down so much that he will even tolerate pats.
Sarah is just one member of a sprawling, loosely organised network of volunteers around Australia who feed, desex, treat and attempt to rehome Australia’s stray cats. It’s not a small problem. Animal shelters are heaving with far more cats and kittens than available homes, and would-be cat adopters are often asked on arrival if they can take two or three rather than one.
But the work that Sarah and many others like her do is controversial. Volunteers who have spoken to Guardian Australia describe experiences of verbal abuse and threats when trying to help strays, and serious online harassment. They allege witnessing cruelty by other members of the public, such as poisoned water bowls or food, and dog owners who allow or encourage their dogs to chase and attack the cats.
There’s the plain old sexist stereotype of the “crazy cat lady”, which Sarah says crops up regularly. “It annoys me. I just do what I can when problems appear at my door. No sane person chooses to have six cats. They just turn up,” she says.
“It seems like you have to be mad to care about hunger and pain. And I don’t know how people can look at a hungry cat and not feed it. They say, ‘don’t feed it, you’ll never get rid of it.’ Well, that doesn’t really solve the problem, does it?”
But there’s another reason this work is controversial. In most parts of Australia, it’s illegal.
‘It’s not their fault’
Cat management has become an issue of concern at a state and federal level over the past decade due to the catastrophic effects cats as introduced predators have on native Australian wildlife.
All cats in Australia are the same species, Felis catus, but a cat’s classification under the law – whether it is a pet or a pest, whose responsibility it is, and how it should be dealt with – varies across jurisdictions, and often depends on a cat’s subjective relationship to the human who encounters it.
Accurate figures are difficult to determine, but using the RSPCA’s preferred classifications, estimates suggest there are 4.9 million owned cats, about 710,000 semi-owned or unowned cats (roaming urban “stray” cats, partially or indirectly reliant on humans) and between 1.4 million and 4.6 million feral cats living in the bush, independent of people. Non-neutered cats are prolific breeders: female cats can become pregnant at four months old and have multiple litters in a season.
The Threatened Species Recovery Hub estimates cats kill 1.9 million reptiles, 1.2 million birds, 3.2 million mammals, 3 million invertebrates and at least 250,000 frogs every day, with pet and urban roaming cats responsible for about 32% of the wildlife death toll. Cats have contributed to the extinction of more than two-thirds of the 34 Australian mammal species lost since colonisation, and have been complicit in the decline of local populations of birds in many cities. In 2023, the Nature Conservation Council, Invasive Species Council, Birdlife Australia, Wires and the Australian Wildlife Society called for local councils to enforce anti-roaming laws for pet cats.
On 24 December the federal environment department released a threat abatement plan for predation by feral cats. It distinguishes between only two kinds of cats, pet and feral. Direct culling of feral cats is a key part of the strategy, methods for which include baiting and shooting. The New South Wales government last year deployed a dedicated shooting team to target cats in the state’s national parks, and the state’s legislative council is in the midst of a cat management inquiry. The Victorian government also just released its own 10-year cat management strategy.
There seems to be little disagreement among cat advocates that feral cats in bushland are devastating for wildlife, though some dispute the numbers, or say cat control is a distraction from the bigger problem of habitat loss (a position that appears to at least partially dovetail with that of some conservationists). Others balk at lethal control methods.
But the debate becomes sharply polarised on the best way to manage semi-owned or unowned urban cats. It’s these cats that people like Sarah are most concerned with.
“I think they’re incredibly destructive to the environment. But I think the question then is, what do you do about it?” she says. “Cats are living creatures too, and many of them are just homeless and hungry. It’s not their fault.”
Trap, neuter, return or catch and kill?
Two of the kittens Sarah adopted were born in the vice-chancellor’s garden at the University of New South Wales. For a long time, the university campus in Kensington, Sydney, had a stray cat problem. Over the years, cats had congregated there, forming a population of about 90 at its peak in 2006. That’s when Emeritus Prof Helen Swarbrick got involved.
“They were breeding, and the university was getting complaints, so they made a decision to call in the pest controllers,” Swarbrick says. “This is a very expensive exercise and not very successful. We protested madly, and finally got the university’s attention.”
She offered the university an alternative strategy: they would trap and desex all the campus cats, then return them to the university grounds to be monitored, fed daily, socialised, given veterinary care, and as many as possible ultimately rehomed. Any new cats that arrived would be similarly treated.
The program was approved by the university and the Campus Cat Coalition was formed. In its first nine years of operation, the coalition worked with a total of 122 cats, including “immigrant” cats, reducing the population to 15, all desexed. At the time of writing, only eight remain, and the program continues with the sanction of the university.
But the practice of “trap, neuter and return” (TNR), a key element of this approach, is fiercely contested. Wildlife and conservation advocates vehemently oppose it. The Invasive Species Council, a staunch advocate for cat control measures, wrote in a submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry in 2020 that there was “little or no evidence that supports the use of TNR as an effective technique for population level management of feral cats” but that there was “a large volume of scientific literature that refutes the claims that TNR is an effective management strategy.” Their view was supported by other submitters including the Threatened Species Recovery Hub, the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, and the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions.
This view is disputed by Swarbrick and others, such as Emeritus Prof Jacquie Rand from University of Queensland’s veterinary science department and the Australian Pet Welfare Foundation. They say other published literature, including their own studies, demonstrates reductions in cat numbers at hotspot sites and surrounding areas over the long-term when sustained desexing, feeding, monitoring, vaccination, and adoption programs are implemented.
Cat management approaches that include TNR are illegal in most parts of the country, though the legislative reasons vary. In NSW, the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act outlaws cat abandonment, though the law hasn’t been tested with instances like the campus cat program. In Queensland, biosecurity laws make it illegal to feed, move, adopt or sell an unowned cat.
In 2013, Brisbane city council introduced a hardline trapping program for pest animals, transporting any captured cats with clear ownership indications such as microchips to a shelter, and euthanising the rest. In the first phase, 391 of the 401 cats captured were euthanised. The program was coupled with a strict law enforcement approach that penalised people for feeding, desexing or rehoming stray cats, resulting in 52 convictions over a three-year period of $27,000 in fines – most repeat offences – and one person receiving a three-month suspended prison sentence for feeding cats.
Rand, who is running alternative cat management trials in Queensland with a permit, argues hardline approaches fail to address the socioeconomic aspects contributing to the stray cat population, such as pet abandonment or loss due to housing instability, rental restrictions or containment challenges, and the cost of mandatory desexing, registration and microchipping. They also unfairly penalise people for basic compassion, she says.
“You can’t ban compassion. Those people will go to jail to continue to help the cats if they feel that those cats need their help, and it wastes so much government money and it damages human wellbeing, and there is a much better way, which is to assist them to get the cats desexed and managed in a way that resolves complaints,” Rand says.
A welfare-based approach should also reduce the burden on vets of large-scale euthanasia of healthy animals, and minimise distress to people who have developed relationships with stray cats, she says.
“We must recognise the value of cats in people’s lives and work with that, because if we don’t, then we can’t solve the problem.”
‘In the end it changed nothing’
When Ludovic* bought a house in a quiet cul-de-sac in Campbelltown, Sydney, four years ago, he adopted two cats. He then quickly discovered a huge colony of them lived in his street.
“Nobody was doing anything about it. I started rescuing the kittens and received some technical support from rescue groups. It took two years but I rehomed about 20 cats and kittens from the colony,” he says. He took in six of them himself, and desexed about 20 more at his own cost and returned them to the street.
It’s a common narrative among urban cat networks. Many volunteers have told Guardian Australia they started trapping and desexing roaming urban cats, usually at their own cost, because they were trying to manage a problem that was literally on their doorstep, and nobody else would.
There is little if any assistance for that from most local councils. They say governments – local, state or federal – should at least partially or wholly subsidise cat desexing, to remove a key financial barrier from responsible cat ownership and minimise proliferation of the problem.
There are 10 cats left in his street, Ludovic says, but only two kittens have been born there since he started neutering them – to a mother cat who had been dumped.
It was not his intention to become a cat advocate. “[But] not doing anything meant dealing with cat poop and cat pee on a daily basis, cat fights, and dealing with half-dead kittens. So it started as an egoistical decision: do something or keep dealing with that for ever.”
Prior to Ludovic’s time there, other neighbours had called in authorities to deal with the cats, and he understands many were euthanised. “My elderly neighbour who was taking care of the cats was devastated,” he says. “And in the end it changed nothing.”
• Guardian Australia is using first names for some community cat advocates to protect their privacy
