Keeping your cat happy and healthy means more than just giving them food and love. It also means keeping them safe and thinking about your neighbours and the environment. Keeping your cat at home helps protect your cat, keeps neighbours happy, and helps keep wildlife safe.

Here are some good ways to keep your cat safe: keep your cat inside; install cat-safe fencing; provide safe and secure outdoor cat enclosures; and go outside with your cat using a harness and lead.

These steps help stop problems like being hit by a car, fighting with other animals, being stolen or getting lost, and getting sick from other cats, poisons, ticks, or plants.

Keeping your cat at home means they are safer and less likely to get hurt or go missing. It also helps keep Tasmania’s native animals safe from cats.

Desexing your cat is also important. Not only does it prevent your cat having kittens or causing another cat to have kittens, cats that are desexed are less likely to spray urine in and around your house, fight with other cats, wander far from home, and display in-season behaviours such as loud vocalisations, trying to get outside and/or other cats hanging around your property.

Desexing also helps keep your cat healthy. They are less likely to get Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) from fights, it can stop or lower the chance of some cancers, and it stops unwanted kittens being born.

Managing stray cats is also important in helping our cats, community and wildlife. You may think you are doing the right thing feeding a stray cat, but it will make the problem worse. Other cats will be attracted by the food and more kittens will be born in the stray population. If you find a stray cat, contact a Cat Management Facility such as Ten Lives Cat Centre for help.

If you need help or advice about your cat or stray cats in your area, contact Ten Lives Cat Centre on 03 6278 2111 or email reception@tenlives.com.au. Together, we can keep cats safe, help our communities, and protect Tasmania’s wildlife.