Background

Issues around the management of cats in the environment and the magnitude of cat impacts on biodiversity are complex and views on how best to respond to them are strongly held.

We are designing and will build and sell devices for the effective management of cats. Our position on cat management is based on the need to recognise and give effect to the rights and responsibilities of everyone within this debate, including cats.

Our Position

We believe that landowners, occupiers and managers have the right to manage cats on their land to reduce or eliminate any adverse effects that cats are causing, including the predation of wildlife and the transmission of disease to livestock.

We also believe this right is balanced by the responsibility for cat managers to undertake cat management, as a minimum, both lawfully and humanely, but also as far as practicable to avoid impacts on non-target animals, including domestic companion cats.

We acknowledge that domestic companion cats are an important part of many people’s lives and that owning and caring for a cat is a right that is supported by law. We also believe this right is balanced by the responsibility for cat owners to care for their pets by providing housing and food in a way that minimises the risk of their pets having adverse impacts on other animals, including wildlife.

To balance these competing rights and responsibilities we believe that everyone, including us, has a role to help reduce the potential for difficulties and conflict around cat management.

We believe that cat managers should only employ live capture trapping techniques, combined with microchip scanning of captured cats when managing cats in any location where there is a realistic chance that cat management will overlap with the presence of domestic companion cats. This will maximise the chance that a companion cat that has been caught can be identified and released unharmed.

We believe that cat owners should at least have their pets microchipped and should fit their cat with a collar and bell both to allow the easy identification of their pet as a companion cat and to reduce the chances of it causing adverse effects on wildlife.

Our Actions

Through our real world experience we know that cats can and do have adverse environmental and biodiversity impacts but we also believe that not all cats are equally culpable.

​We will strive to produce the best cat management devices we can and these will be consistent with our position on humane control. We will also provide and update information on our website to help ensure this ongoing debate has accurate information upon which people can make their own decisions about responsible cat management.

​Revised 3 May 2018