She studies why so many people are reluctant to keep their cats from roaming – despite the countless benefits for the cats as well as the cat owners.

Lynette will be speaking about that next week at the New Zealand Companion Animal Conference in Auckland.

She was interviewed yesterday by Wallace Chapman on RNZ National, and you can listen to the interview below.

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A Unitec master’s student has tracked 37 Auckland cats using GPS while recording their activities on video.

The 180 hours of footage reveals cats getting into 326 risky situations, ranging from cat fights (11) to wandering on roads (a third of the cats did so).

“To better protect cats and also the wildlife species that we have, ideally there would be closer management of cats,” said the researcher, Stephanie Bruce.

Read more at stuff.co.nz

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An aerial image showing the travels of New Plymouth cat ‘Dingles’ during daytime.

We’ve written before about the studies, where researchers put GPS trackers on people’s cats, and then show them where their pet has travelled.

Invariably, cat owners are amazed at how far their pets wander, often crossing busy streets in the process.

The latest such research is from New Plymouth.

You can read the story on stuff.co.nz.

[22 Nov 2017]

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The aim of the project was to educate cat owners and promote awareness of the surprisingly large distances that domestic cats can roam if they’re given free access to the outdoors.

Small GPS motion-sensing devices were attached to domestic cats using a fitted harness for up to 10 days, to see how far the cats were travelling when unsupervised.

“Many people mistakenly believe their cats don’t leave the back yard, but the results of our survey are proving otherwise,” said Peter Evans from Central Tablelands Local Land Services. “One of the cats tracked through the survey travelled more than three kilometres from home.”

“In general the other cats involved in the project had a range of several hundred metres and the maps of their movements gave us some intriguing insights into their expeditions around the neighbourhood.

“There were also quite a few uncooperative cats. We started the project with 25 registered volunteers, but some cats refused to wear the harnesses, some lost their GPS monitoring devices, and some devices appeared to have been stolen, leaving us with a final tally of 14 cats completing the project.”

The owners of the cats have taken a keen interest in the data collected, including Stephen Barnes, who says he was shocked when the GPS mapping revealed his cat Semi had roamed up to three kilometres from home.

“It was surprising. If anyone had asked me before, I would have said the cats just hang around, never far from the backyard,” said Stephen.

Stephen initially registered three cats to take part in the GPS monitoring, including ‘Squid’, a fat ginger tabby, and ‘Semi’, whom Stephen adopted after finding the black and white cat abandoned some years ago. Unfortunately the third cat, ‘Shoebert,’ was unwilling to wear the harness and had to be withdrawn from the project.

Meanwhile the GPS mapping revealed that Squid had been taking regular walks to the local high school and to a nearby shopping centre, while Semi was tracked three kilometres away on the mountain behind Stephen’s house.

“Semi tended to use the storm drain system on his travels in town, but when I found out Squid may have been crossing roadways on his adventures, I was concerned he could cause an accident and people might be hurt if they swerved to miss him on the road,” said Stephen.

Stephen has now changed the way he cares for his cats as a result of tracking project.

“I used to let them out in the morning at 5:00 am. Now I don’t let them out till much later in the morning when I can keep a better watch on them, and I also call them in much earlier in the afternoon to ensure they are inside before evening,” said Stephen.

“After taking part in the project and learning just how far the cats are prepared to wander, I would urge people to pay closer attention to where their pets are and to bring them in at night. Also it’s clear that cats need to be desexed because it’s very difficult to ensure they’re kept away from other cats.”

Central Tablelands Local Land Services is now looking to roll out the project in other Local Government areas on the Central Tablelands in coming months as part of a national cat tracking program.

This project is supported by Central Tablelands Local Land Services through funding from the Australian Government’s National Landcare Programme.

Source: http://centraltablelands.lls.nsw.gov.au

31 August 2016

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Photo: Eiji Ienaga on Flickr

Most cat owners are surprised to learn how far their free-range cat will actually travel, and the dangers they will encounter along the way.

Fortunately, we have some insight into both of these questions, thanks to research conducted in 2014 by Mya Gaby of Victoria University of Wellington. Her full report (see link below) is an excellent read, but I’ll summarise some of the highlights here.

Mya was particularly interested in tracking the behaviour of ordinary pet cats living near the Zealandia wildlife sanctuary in Wellington. She recruited ten cat owners from the area, and taught them how to fit a tiny video camera to their cat’s collar. The cameras were motion activated, and Mya analysed only their behaviour when outdoors.

Quoting from the report:

All ten cats exhibited at least one risk behaviour during the eight weeks of data collection.

The most common risk behaviours exhibited by suburban, domestic free-roaming cats in Wellington included:
climbing trees or onto a roof (80 per cent of individuals), entering crawl spaces (70 per cent), consuming liquids not left by owner (60 per cent), encountering cats that were not from the same household (60 per cent) and crossing roads (40 per cent).

Most participants encountering cats (not from the same household) had non-aggressive encounters (76 per cent of the time). However, cat fights were witnessed with 40 per cent of participants engaging in one aggressive physical contact with a stranger cat.

The table below lists the type of risk behaviours witnessed via Eyenimal™ Cat Videocams and includes the collective sum for the number of times each was counted. Unexpectedly, we also found one cat entered a stranger’s home and nine out of ten cats in this study left their properties on at least one occasion.

Just a couple of comments about the table above:

• It identifies the risk of “crossing road” as “injury”. In our experience as cat breeders, cats struck by cars are more likely to be killed than injured.
• It doesn’t include risks such as simply walking onto a neighbour’s property. We have seen cases recently in New Zealand of cats being maimed in leghold traps set by hostile neighbours, or attacked by neighbours or their dogs.
• The cameras were only able to record for 2.5 hours at a stretch, so it is quite likely that a number of risky behaviours were not recorded.

Quoting again from the report:

In the United States the average life-expectancy of a strictly indoors pet cat versus a free-roaming pet cat varies dramatically, 12-18 years versus 3 years, respectively (Humane Society of the United States, 2013). This is likely due to free-roaming domestic cats exhibiting risk behaviours whilst outdoors.

Overseas, free-roaming cats may also encounter predators themselves, such as coyotes, whereas domestic cats in
New Zealand have no predators.

And:

Traffic accidents, conflict with other animals and exposure to poisons and disease are just some of the causes that can also contribute to free-roaming cat death. Domestic free-roaming cats contracting an infectious disease or obtaining an injury is of particular concern as more than half of our study cats were witnessed encountering stranger cats.

Cats in New Zealand can carry a number of diseases which includes, but is not limited to; toxoplasmosis, cat scratch disease and feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV). The exposure of cats to these diseases is heightened if cats are free-roaming, as they are more likely to come into contact with another infected individual.

Full report:
Mya A Gaby: A REPORT ON FREE-ROAMING DOMESTIC CAT ACTIVITIES IN URBAN AREAS

9 July 2016

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Cat owners are more concerned about the welfare of their pet than the risk they pose to wildlife when roaming freely, an international study has found.

Murdoch University researchers in Perth surveyed more than 1,700 cat owners and non-cat owners from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, USA, China and Japan, and found stark differences in practices towards pet cats’ interactions with wildlife.

Although Australians were more likely than other nationalities to be concerned about the impact of cats on native wildlife, New Zealanders and Chinese were at the other end of the scale.

More…

18 May 2016

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Yolanda van Heezik, a senior lecturer in zoology at Otago University, has been studying the impact of cats on wildlife. She’s found that there are about 220 pet cats per square kilometre in Dunedin (the number of stray/feral cats is unknown) and that cats kill 1350 birds per square kilometre each year.

As she tells Dunedin TV, pet cats are at risk if they roam – particularly if they are not microchipped.

Stray cats have diseases which they can pass to people’s cats, and also to people as well, and of course they have an impact on wildlife.

If we want to try and manage stray cats, then we need to microchip pet cats so that when cats are caught then we know that they actually belong to someone.

Dr van Heezik says many New Zealanders still don’t feel they need to do anything to control their pet cat.

It’s interesting, because in fact, because dog ownership has become much more regulated and, over the past couple of decades, people’s attitudes have changed about how dogs should be owned. But that same process hasn’t really happened for cats, so perhaps we need to think about doing that.

15 January 2016

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