About This Project
What can cat shelters do when they are full but more cats are surrendered? A short period where people can adopt for free might increase adoptions, but will the owners be responsible?
I will determine if this worry is justified by following up free adoptions compared to owners who paid normal charges. If results support the conclusion that adopters at the free weekend are as responsible as others, then shelters can reduce overcrowding without compromising the welfare of adopted cats.
Ask the Scientists
Join The DiscussionWhat is the context of this research?
Cat shelters face heart-breaking decisions when overcrowded. Should cats that have been there longest be euthanized to make room for new arrivals? Should new arrivals be turned away? Or should there be a short period where people can adopt a cat for free to increase adoptions? The third option is tempting, but may attract irresponsible owners who don't care for the cat properly. Previous research found that free and paying adoptors had similar levels of attraction to their pets, but there is little information on husbandry and fate of pets. Knowing the fates of cats from free and paid adoptions and how the owners care for them, especially compliance with regulations on responsible ownership, is important in evaluating free adoptions.
What is the significance of this project?
Determining if free adopters are similar to paying adopters in matters such as ID of animals and compliance with local government regulations for responsible ownership is important in assuring shelter management that cats given away freely will be cared for properly. It is also important to assess the short-term fate of animals (returned to the shelter, run away, died, developed health or behavior problems).
If data support the conclusion that free adopters have similar levels of responsibility to people who pay to adopt a cat, then shelters can be more confident that occasional waiving of adoption fees can be used to reduce overcrowding without compromising the welfare of adopted cats. The increased adoption rates will reduce costs for shelters, as well as euthanasia rates of healthy cats.
What are the goals of the project?
Starting in July 2016, I will use telephone follow ups after free adoptions and paying adoptions to compare fates of cats one month later (returned, died, escaped, etc.) and husbandry. A standard schedule of questions will be asked of each adopter. If free adoption does not compromise cat welfare, then cats from free and paid adoptions will have similar fates. Free adopters should also be as compliant with regulations as paying adopters, equally likely to report problems, and not hoard animals. Free and paying adopters should also be equally likely to confine their cats, when matched by suburban location for known risk factors to roaming cats such as high traffic density.
Statsitical comparisons of results will show clearly if free adopters manage cats as responsibly as paying adopters.
Budget
Open Access publication will make the peer-reviewed results of the project available online immediately and freely to all readers. This will be valuable for animal charities who cannot afford to pay to purchase research papers.
Contacting several hundred people by phone as followup to adoptions will be very time-consuming. Paid assistance to perform this task will ensure that it is undertaken expeditiously. The sum requested allows 20 hours of assistance at a rate of $50/hour, which is appropriate for a trained research assistant.
Meet the Team
Michael Calver
I’m best described as a frustrated entomologist. After completing a PhD on grasshopper ecology in 1985, my early jobs as a research scientist (vertebrate pests), a secondary school teacher (a background in vertebrate pests was useful for this) and a Lecturer in Distance Education provided little opportunity for entomological research. I thought things were looking up when I accepted a position in the School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology at Murdoch University, Western Australia, in 1994, but I soon discovered that the prospective research students mostly wanted to work on mammals, although birds were accepted grudgingly as a second choice. I thus became a de facto vertebrate wildlife biologist, with insects only entering the picture as food for ‘real animals’. With the exception of some brief flirtations with plant pathology and bibliometrics, terrestrial vertebrate wildlife remain, by default, my main area of research.
Fortunately, working with wildlife allows me to indulge my affection for cats. Pet cats have a bad press in relation to wildlife because some of them are proficient hunters. One owner explained that her cat caught a bird at dawn and another at dusk every day – on the day of a solar eclipse, it caught 4. Of course, this doesn't mean that cats should be prohibited pets! Instead, as a society we should be promoting responsible cat ownership to reduce the numbers of abandoned cats and managing cats to prevent damaging interactions with wildlife. The idea of investigating the welfare of cats adopted without payment from shelters is a part of this view, because if more cats can be rehomed to responsible owners there should be better cat welfare and fewer problems.
Project Backers
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- $10.00Average Donation