http://thechronicleherald.ca/Editorial/1035208.html
Halifax, NS | Mon, February 4th, 2008

TheChronicleHerald.ca version for persons with vision loss

Declaw bylaw, councillors

Thu. Jan 31 - 4:48 AM

WHEN A SMALL majority of HRM councillors finally passed an ill-conceived cat bylaw last fall, we heard a lot of pious talk about how licensing cats and rounding up strays and trespassing animals would force pet owners to be responsible.

OK, councillors, if responsibility is so important, how about showing some yourselves? How about acknowledging it's grossly irresponsible to implement this bylaw on April 1, for the following obvious reasons?

You haven't provided a new shelter to house all the cats that will be rounded up under the statute or any system of adopting them out. You haven't set a budget to fund such a shelter. You have no idea what a facility will cost or what response, if any, you will get to a tender call for shelter services.

How about listening, too, to the warnings of people who know something about animal shelters and programs?

Pamela Keddy, provincial SPCA president, told this newspaper Sunday that she expects the bylaw will lead to the capture of a "staggering" number of cats - beyond the capacity of metro's two shelters to house or adopt out. The projections, she says, are "worrisome" and the SPCA shelter could be "inundated very quickly."

She also says building a new shelter could be prohibitively expensive for taxpayers - Calgary has spent several million dollars on two shelters - and that it's difficult for the SPCA to price a bid to provide the city with shelter services that no one can quantify.

"We have to make sure we can do it," she told The Chronicle Herald. "We're not going to jump in blindly and say we can."

Not jumping in blindly should be your policy, too, councillors. For Ms. Keddy is essentially warning that you are now courting an animal-welfare disaster.

The new bylaw virtually incites a witch hunt for "at-large" cats, feral and pets alike. It encourages people to treat their very existence as a nuisance and gives anyone licence to trap these poor creatures, whether or not they are doing any demonstrable harm and even when they are doing obvious good, like keeping down the rat population in the port.

The result is sure to be a round-up of thousands of cats who will be put to death because there are no facilities to house them and no way to find them homes.

For council to proceed down this ugly, and avoidable, path would be an unethical act of inhumanity to animals - a black mark on Halifax.

At the very least, implementing the bylaw should be deferred until council has taken credible steps to prevent its resulting in a cat massacre. Better still, the cat provisions of the bylaw should be scrapped - as advocated by Deputy Mayor Steve Adams and by a majority of respondents in a poll of Haligonians last month.

It's morally indefensible to spend millions on public cat prisons when the city's shelters for homeless human beings are struggling to stay open around the clock in cold weather.

And this hysterical focus on destroying cats is misguided as well as cruel. Council should take the good advice of animal welfare advocates and veterinarians that it would cost less, and be more effective and humane, to subsidize pet neutering where needed and to expand existing catch, neuter and release programs for feral cats. That's an approach many cat owners and lovers would be willing to support financially.

So show us some real responsibility, councillors. Rewrite the law and pull back from a course that is heading toward a shameful travesty.