On cats, councils, common sense and Twain

 

 

 

By PAUL SCHNEIDEREIT
Tue. Mar 4 - 4:46 AM

HALIFAX regional council, in its great, uh, wisdom, has pronounced itself interested in holding a meeting to hear public views on its new cat bylaw.

I kid you not.

My question is: Wasn’t council listening the first time?

With less than a month to go before the new bylaw is to take effect, municipal politicians are having second thoughts about the whole matter. Why? Well, in a closed meeting last month, councillors were formally introduced to estimates of the cost they’d be asked to swallow for sheltering all the roaming cats expected to be picked up under the new regulations. My guess is that the numbers, whatever they were, went over like a future hairball with quite a few councillors.

Which, frankly, is sort of odd. Last fall, when council debated the issue before passing the cat bylaw in a 11-9 vote, the estimated cost of a facility big enough to handle all incoming felines sent to the, let’s face it, mass euthanizing centre, was tossed around as roughly $3 million. That didn’t seem to faze the majority of councillors who passed the measure, but then again, that was in future dollars, not ones that had to be spent at the moment.

Imagine their surprise when, behind closed doors, they recently learned at least some of those future dollars were going to have to be converted to real ones, and included in this year’s budget. Quick as you can say fall municipal election, I reckon, some mighty serious second-thinking commenced.

Now, I don’t claim to know what actually happened in that meeting. Maybe a majority of councillors thought a new shelter could be built for free. Maybe they thought that the cat bylaw fairy would appear and get them out of their own self-created mess. But it’s clear the price tag attached to the bylaw caused, anticipated or not, sticker shock.

Mayor Peter Kelly, sticking to the party line of a “contractual matter,” wasn’t going to hiss and tell. “We can’t get into details right now,” the mayor said, though he allowed the issue was over “dollars” and finding enough of them. “Due to financial implications,” Kelly monotoned, the city would go back to the public for input and “to see whether or not they wish to remove cats from Bylaw A-300.”

The rub is, of course, that a majority of the public who voiced opinions last fall had already made it exceedingly clear that they didn’t want a cat bylaw, at least not the one proposed. Most speakers at a public hearing were against the bylaw. This newspaper also published many letters, the vast majority opposed to licensing cats.

Perhaps regional council could have pondered Mark Twain’s advice about cats. “Never try to teach a cat to sing,” the humourist once cautioned. “It wastes your time, and it annoys the cat.” In other words, perhaps council, in its, uh, wisdom, might have realized that the reason so many people have been against the various incarnations of the cat bylaw is that it’s not a good idea.

Sadly, however, council seems to have learned nothing over the years. A proposed cat bylaw was before a new council in the summer of 1996, months after amalgamation. The issue had been discussed repeatedly by the old Halifax city council as well. In 2004, this paper noted that council had debated a cat bylaw 22 times since amalgamation – and that was before the many sessions that brought us the unenforceable legislation passed last fall.

Some councillors have protested that they’ve got a bad rap over the cat bylaw fiasco, that criticisms that council wastes time on cats while there are more important matters ignores the fact that council does plenty of other things, too. Fair enough. Let the record reflect that council does not only spend its time debating inane rules regarding felines that most cat owners will ignore and that, as a result, bring council into disrepute. But here we are, looking back at a dozen years of debates on cats at city hall, and ahead at proposals for a public hearing and, gasp, plebiscite, and I know I’m not alone in saying: Enough already.

Stray cats, I would speculate, have been with us throughout human history. Rather than penalizing responsible cat owners – the only ones who’d pay licence fees – and creating financial disincentives around stray cat adoptions, or building industrial-scale cat-killing centres, perhaps council could focus on programs that have been shown to work, like catch, neuter and release schemes to stabilize feral cat populations. If particular roaming cats are a problem in specific situations, deal with them. Don’t turn neighbour against neighbour throughout HRM and let stand a law most people view with derision.

“The man who carries a cat by the tail,” goes yet another Twain witticism, “learns something that can be learned in no other way.” Will council finally conclude it’s time to let go?

pauls

COMMENTS

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EricS wrote:
I would like to help Council with some vision on this issue. I see Steve Murphy on Live-at-Five interviewing an aging war veteran about the disappearance of his sole companion, his cat. Of course the veteran will be in obviously ill-health and will be holding a faded picture of his only companion sitting on his knee. And the cat will be called Mountbatten or Churchhill or the like………….are you getting my drift yet??? It will make for great Supper Hour TV…….probably become an issue in the upcoming elections. A web site will go up www.councillorsagaintscats.com….pictures of other “disappered” cats will start being posted….etc etc As my ancient Irish Mother says “Common Sense Isn’t!!!!”

David fm CH wrote:
The unfortunate thing about this is that the irresponsible cat owners will once again have free reign to allow their animals to breed, roam, howl, fight, destroy and spread disease. In the long run, it will be the cats themselves that suffer as it has been in the past.

Fsmith wrote:
What happens when you get rid of all the cats, you will be over-run with mice and rats. I remember when I was in school inthe early 60’s they tried the samething in I thing it was London Eng. and they had to bring the cats back. I would sooner have cats than rats and mice running around. FSmith

Frank wrote:
Right on Mr. S., catch, neuter and release any stray cat that draws complaints, and let that be the end of the matter.