Cool for cats – how practices can ensure felids aren’t the underdog

Huge strides have been made across the decades to secure equality of veterinary care for cats – but challenges still need to be tackled before canids and felids are on a level playing field.

With the evocative title of “Why are cats always the underdog?”, a BVA Live debate session charted the successes to date in furthering veterinary knowledge of cats and slowly changing the opinions of a nation where dogs had long ruled as man’s best friend.

Despite combined efforts by vets, VNs, organisations and charities to champion cats, many are not having their basic health and welfare needs met – while lawmakers are still ignoring them when drafting legislation. Some owners, meanwhile, risk following dog-caring counterparts in making harmful breed choices and not researching the pet’s needs before taking the plunge.

Justine Shotton, chairing the panel session and setting the scene for some of its discussion points, said cats “seem to get a worse deal in policy and sometimes in practice”.

She said: “Since the last general election, there have been twice as many mentions of dogs and puppies than cats and kittens in Westminster, despite the work of the BVA, my colleagues, and my colleagues on this panel as well. There are estimated to be more owned cats in the UK than dogs. It is 10.7 million cats compared to 9.6 million dogs, according to PDSA’s Animal Wellbeing Report from last year, so we should be thinking about cats and talking about cats more.

“Dogs are known as more of a political animal, and with cats not getting that look in. Why is this? And when it comes to clinical care and outcomes, again, why do cats seem to be second place? In our BVA Voice of the Veterinary Profession survey, we explored this a little bit.

“On average, around one quarter of the cats vets see are not having their five welfare needs met, according to our survey. When we asked about these needs, issues around companionship – cats being housed with or apart from other animals – came up as the most important and concerning issue, with 70% of respondents saying this need wasn’t being met.

“Sixty-one per cent said that the health needs weren’t being met and 59% said the behaviour needs weren’t being met – and these are all quite concerning, given the number of cats we have as our pets.

“And when we asked about other pressing issues, just over two-fifths of vets cited obesity or behavioural problems with stress associations of being in a multi-cat household as being important. And a third of vets were also concerned about dental health.”

Good and band perceptions

Claire Bessant, chief executive of International Cat Care (iCatCare) – a charity committed to advancing feline veterinary medicine and improving owner knowledge since it started at the Feline Advisory Bureau (FAB) in 1958 – outlined some of the good and bad perceptions of dogs and cats. Dogs – traditionally working and guard animals, and viewed as potentially dangerous – became socially acceptable as pets and viewed as companions because they were loyal, and able to be handled and trained.

Cats were not so established as specific breeds, were valued as pest control and were relatively easily available, and although they were less easy to handle and medicate, they were not considered as dangerous dogs.

Ms Bessant said Cats Protection had started discussing the need for cat neutering as early as 1947. Numbers of cats had increased substantially by 1966 and the FAB was, at this point, actively pushing for better health care for cats. Cats Protection’s neutering vouchers were launched in 1970.

She said understanding of cats’ well-being and physical health had come a long way over the years, driven by charities doing a fabulous job, and cats were today considered members of the family.

Despite the successes, Sarah Caney, veterinary specialist in feline medicine, said the profession still faced challenges in tackling health and welfare issues in cats. Citing the BVA Voice of the Veterinary Profession survey mentioned earlier by Dr Shotton, Dr Caney said: “What I read from the survey was that certainly there are some important unmet needs in our work with cats. The three most pressing health and welfare issues that were identified through the survey were obesity, behaviour problems – particularly in the context of multicat households – and dental disease.

“For the companion animal vets, the median score of people estimating cats were not having their welfare needs met was 15%, and the top three welfare needs that were not being met were related to the housing of cats, so the need to be housed with or apart from other animals; the need to be protected from pain, suffering, injury and disease; and the need to be able to exhibit normal behaviour.

“Really, a lot of it is about understanding cats and being able to interpret cats, which are some of the challenges we have. Some people took the time to enter some additional comments [in the survey], and I pulled out some that were indicative of the whole picture, but again highlight some of the challenges.

“One was ‘biggest misconception about cats is that they are social animals’. A lot of owners have expectations of what they want their pet to do and they impose that expectation on the cat – sometimes at the detriment of the cat. As the cats’ advocates, it is our job to do our best to protect the cats.”

Others within the survey mentioned problems in owners identifying and appreciating pain in cats – especially from dental disease – or that they were suffering with aspects of their housing.

‘Appreciative’

Dr Caney said the survey also shows a “frustration that sometimes, in spite of advice being given, owners are not always appreciative” of what clinicians are telling or advising them.

She told session attendees she did not particularly like the title of the debate, but she admitted actions still needed to be taken to address issues in cats.

Dr Caney added: “I don’t think cats are the underdog, but I would definitely acknowledge that there are still a lot of challenges that remain to us, and some of them are very difficult. I think a lot of them come down to owners really understanding ‘what is a cat?’, ‘what does it need?’ and ‘what should my relationship with this cat be like?’, and us being, as professionals, the ones who are there to hopefully safeguard and advocate for the cat to the extent we are able to.

“There are a lot of issues that are perhaps quite complex to communicate with an owner, and perhaps the owners might not think they need this information, but as clinicians I think the engagement points – the opportunities we have, particularly in early life appointments, so the kitten appointment – we need to just find ways of exploiting them as best as possible to get messages across.”

These messages included convincing owners that vets wanted to be there throughout cats’ lives and the people owners sought all advice from relevant to their cats – including housing, behaviour and the environment – and not just for health care reasons.

The Cat Friendly Clinic initiative – from iCatCare’s International Society of Feline Medicine veterinary division – and other research had helped ensure trips to veterinary practices were less stressful for cats and their owners.

Opportunity

However, Dr Caney saw this as an opportunity for the veterinary profession – and one where it could consider use of current technologies to achieve success.

She said: “We still need to really work on ways of minimising stress for our cat owners, because there are now a number of publications and studies that have shown that even our very best of clients, our most engaged clients, actually put off going to the vet with their cat if they perceive it is an non-essential visit. So, for example, a booster vaccination or perhaps preventive health care assessment – we do know people will put off that visit because if they have witnessed stress in their cat, it really deters them from bringing the cat in.

“I would like us embracing modern technology some more; I would like us to think about the cat-free consult, because as a medicine clinician as well, I know that actually it is the talking to the owner bit that usually is the most helpful bit of the diagnostic process anyway.

“Of course, we do need to examine our patients, we do need to do tests – but the history itself is phenomenally powerful and we can do that over a phone or a video consult, or a face-to-face consult without the cat being present, and actually achieve an awful lot.

“We need to be very proactive, we need to make sure we make the most of opportunities. As I’ve said, the early life appointments are particularly the time where we want people to know that the vet clinic is the place they should always think of coming to for advice and for support.”

Consultations

Dr Caney added: “They don’t always have to bring their animal with them to seek that advice and support – I am not saying we give our advice and support without charging, but we actually can do consultations without the presence of an animal, and that can be very effective.

“So, a whole team approach – the receptionists I think need to be very on board with this, as well as our nurses and our clinicians – using that whole-practice collaborative approach, using resources that are available to us through organisations such as iCatCare.”

A cited example of the resources available included the “How to tell your cat’s age in human years” page on the iCatCare website, which had proved useful in Dr Caney’s engagement with her clients.

She said: “I found this sort of resource so helpful in discussions, because it not only tells us about the cats, their life stage and their age, and their age in our years as it were, but it gives a human equivalent age that then means those preventive health care discussions relevant to the older cat are so much easier – because we are talking about this cat that is the equivalent of a 75 or 85-year-old person.

“Therefore, it is much easier for our carers to understand that what we are talking about is actually providing best care.”

Neutering

An area the profession and the charities have been strong on is the promotion of neutering.

Cats Protection, the RSPCA, PDSA and Battersea have joined forces on CatKind – a kitten neutering database that also provides resources to help ensure four-month neutering is the norm for cats. The partnership neutered 200,000 cats alone in 2019.

Dr Caney said: “Prepubertal neutering is something that Cats Protection has done a lot to educate and inform the veterinary profession about and to support. The great advantage of this is from primarily a population control perspective, because cats can mature and have kittens pretty quickly, and to the best of our current knowledge, there isn’t any detrimental impact on the health of our cats by following prepubertal neutering.

“Those clinicians who do it would say it is something that is very successful to be done in practice. It is not the scary thing people might have worried about 5 or 10 years ago, and even if you are not already in a clinic that perhaps supports it, you are probably in a clinic that would if they were aware of all the information that is available.”

Madison Rogers, acting head of advocacy and government relations for Cats Protection, told the audience that the charity ran the world’s largest neutering programme – covering around 100,000 cats a year.

Taking Dr Shotton’s earlier points on legislation further, she said: “If we look back historically, you will see that lots of legislation relating to animals comes about in a reactive fashion, often as a result of huge neglect or cruelty, which is quite sad and disappointing.

“Some of the laws related to dogs come about because they have that perception of danger, and if you drill down into the legislation, some of these pieces of law are related to human safety rather than any kind of concern over welfare.

“If we fast-forward a little bit, things improve, which is really good to see.”

An example is the Government’s moves to introduce compulsory microchipping of owned cats in England.

She said: “I am pleased to say the Government has now committed to introducing compulsory microchipping of owned cats; they featured it in their party manifesto and it has also been in the action plan for animal welfare, which was released recently.

“It hasn’t passed yet, so we are still hot on their heels to make sure that this piece of legislation does get introduced, and it will be a real step forward.”

Purchasing trends

How people buy pets – predominantly dogs – has been changing for some time, while the popularity of brachycephalic breeds shows little sign of waning.

But Ms Rogers said would-be owners were also increasingly making choices for cats.

She said: “There have been some really interesting trends in the sale of cats in the past few years. These trends we have seen have been accelerated by the pandemic, but we have looked back a bit further and there is evidence that they started to accelerate and then the pandemic just made them even more apparent.

“We think these are trends that are here to stay now. The first part of this is people are going online to buy cats, as opposed to adopting, or slightly more traditional ways of getting a cat from Doris down the road who your mum maybe knew five or 10 years ago. So, what we are seeing now is 34% of people going online to buy a cat as opposed to 24% of people five years ago.

“There has been a rise in the number of breeds that are popular for cats, which is a worrying trend, as we have seen this in the dog market.

“Lots of people now want very pretty pedigree breeds, but what we found really interesting in the research we did was that it wasn’t people wanting a pedigree cat with all the lineage – people wanted a cat that looks a certain way and they are not that bothered about whether it has got the paperwork, as maybe we see in the dog market.

“So, this could suggest that there are differentiations we need to be aware of within the market, and Government needs to respond to.”

She added: “And then, of course, we have all heard about the puppy pandemic, the price rises for puppies – 200 people being interested in buying one puppy online. We have seen the same kind of trends for cats.

“Again, this is pushing prices up, so you can now see cats going for more than £1,000 – especially if they are pedigree breeds. Even moggies have now have drastically increased in price, making it a slightly more lucrative market.”

Earlier, Ms Bessant had raised similar concerns about owners choosing unusual cat breeds.

She said: “We are trying to stop the cat world going in that direction. It would be a crime if this crazy fashion in breeding for the bizarre and grotesque is allowed to influence the future of the cat. It hasn’t influenced it quite as much, but I think we are still going swiftly in that direction. Surely, we can look at dogs and say: ‘stop’.”

Drawing the session to a close and summarising some of the points made earlier in the debate, Ms Bessant said of cats: “They are becoming more and more popular, it is becoming more acceptable to say you like them, but they are not well understood.

“We find it difficult to understand them, to understand the signals they give, and then we become anthropomorphic about it, so we put down their behaviours to the way we would see things, which of course, again, is not very good for cat welfare, and it is a really lazy way of doing things.

“Of course, occasionally being anthropomorphic does allow us to be empathetic. So, it is really getting the balance of that kind of thing right.”