Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Without labouring the point, I refer to an issue raised in Galway and in other places. A pest control company was hired to exterminate cats. It was alleged this was to do with the hospital in Galway. The Minister has put it very well. There are three classes of cat. A fully domesticated cat lives in the house; the second class of cat is attached to a premises but fends for itself quite a bit; the third class is the completely wild cat. The challenge is that if the legislative route is chosen it will be a case of how to define the three classes of cat and then how will the cats be identified in practice. There are two options. Pest control is not the way to deal with feral cats. Legislation is not always the answer to a problem; a non-legislative programme to deal with the issue by means of welfare bodies may be preferable. Ensuring that the codes of practice stipulate that feral cats cannot be treated as vermin and that this rule is implemented, would give better results. Once the Bill is passed - I know the Department has a large work programme - I ask that in the second half of this year the Minister would come to the committee with proposals on how a programme might be put in place to deal with the feral cat issue in a positive way. In my view, schemes and programmes and working with animal welfare organisations and ensuring that it is not viewed as vermin control would produce the same result in a slightly different way, one that avoids impossible legal definitions and the impossible interpretation - which is the big problem - of the legal definition. It is very difficult to be absolutely certain of the status of a captured cat. Is a record maintained other than on the micro-chip?

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