I was at the barbers today to have what hair I have left trimmed 🙂 . As usual for the UK, the hairdresser was Polish (sometimes they are Albanian or Hungarian). And she was a woman. Most Polish hairdressers in the UK are women it seems. They are all good hairdressers. But we never see Anglo Saxons cutting hair these days. I am not complaining but it’s an odd situation. It gave me the opportunity to talk about cats!
She likes cats. I didn’t tell her about this site or that I’d been studying wild, domestic and feral cats for 16 years. She told me that in Poland the default policy when adopting a cat from a shelter (animal rescue shelter) is that the adopter must agree to keep the cat inside the home full-time for their life to both keep the cat safe and protect wildlife. She mentioned to protect birds. These are the normal reasons for confining domestic cats.
Everyone is speciesist as birds are always given priority over mice in terms of protection from cat predation. No one ever keeps their cat inside the home to protect mice! But in God’s eyes (I am an athesist) they are equal to birds.
I suggested that it must be very difficult to enforce this contractual agreement. Who’s going to check the many thousands of people who’ve adopted cats from these shelters? They’ve not got the manpower to do it themselves.
She said neighbours spied on their neighbours! Well actually it was me who said that this happened and she did not disagree. It is the only way you coould enforce the agreement.
It will be a pretty effective enforcement method but unpleasant at the same time. Imagine being spied on and observed by your neighbours with whom you are meant to get along nicely to ensure that there is peace and harmony in the neighbourhood.
I can’t think of anything more likely to undermine good relations between neighbours that being reported to a shelter that you allowed your cat outside. If you did the shelter would probably seize your cat and rehome her. Draconian I suppose.
I had no idea that Poland was so ‘advanced’ in insisting on full-time indoor cat ownership. If you buy a purebred cat from a breeder in Poland you can do what you want. There is no obligation to keep the purebred cat inside but you will keep them inside because they are valuable and attractive to theives.
The end result is that in Poland you should be seeing a lot fewer cats outside than in many other countries.
The more advanced the country, the more likely it is that cats will be confined to the home. That’s the direction of travel on cat ownership in developed countries. In countries like India or Pakistan it is pure laissez-faire; anything goes and it often does. There’s far too much unrestricted community cat procreation in countries like India which can only lead to neglect, cat abuse and cruelty.
RELATED: Factors influencing the length of stay (LOS) of cats at shelters
