November 2025
If you care and have compassion for abandoned and rescued cats, please contact the NSW Premier to give your support for the recent Inquiry Management of Cat Populations NSW – we need more proactive solutions like these!
https://www.nsw.gov.au/nsw-government/premier-of-nsw/contact-premier
[You may use your own words or at least use the first paragraph that follows]
The Inquiry Management of Cat Populations NSW included proactive proven solutions for funding desexing and replicating cultural change to rapidly increase cat containment, etc which is fully supported. The Companion Animal Amendment Control of Cats bill appears to be ignoring the domestic cat evidence from a range of experts, has major flaws in mandatory containment, lacking humanely managing lost, abandoned and stray cats, which is not supported.
During the Inquiry, many leading animal welfare experts
- supported cat containment through proactive programs, and
- did NOT SUPPORT MANDATORY CONTAINMENT for which negative consequences far outweigh improvements which has been scientifically proven in councils who have already implemented cat containment, which was covered extensively in the NSW Inquiry, and NOT supported by a range of animal welfare organisations.
Refer Royal Society for Protection of Animals NSW, Animal Welfare League NSW, Cat Protection Society NSW, Australian Pet Welfare Foundation, G2Z (Getting to Zero), who did NOT support mandatory containment as documented under the NSW Inquiry.
Inquiry Management of Cat Populations NSW
In August 2025, the findings and recommendations from the Inquiry Management of Cat Populations were published.
This included several recommendations for desexing programs, and for promoting cat containment over mandatory legislation, both based on extensive Australian scientific evidence across a number of domestic cat welfare experts and their proven successful programs.
The direction for proactive engaging community programs was, in summary, based on:
- the proven RSPCA NSW holistic human behaviour change program improving uptake in cat containment
- negative outcomes for punitive approaches includes financial costs to councils and ratepayers, mental strain on council staff, vets, rescuers and communities, focus on helping wildlife is diluted
- positive encouragement achieves high rates of uptake
- no proof to date on the success of mandatory containment from any Australian council
Greens NSW Control of Cats Bill
In October, Greens NSW introduced a Companion Animals Amendment (Control of Cats) Bill 2025 to counter the Inquiry recommendations, primarily for mandating cat containment. However, the bill also has other intentions under “related purposes”. During the Inquiry hearings, in the Greens NSW media releases, and Sue Higginson’s bill webpage and email template, it is evident that mass culling of ALL stray cats is a primary aim (domestic semi owned and unowned cats in urban and peri urban areas).
Mandatory containment legislation implies all roaming unchipped cats will be seen as illegal, which also implies assisting these cats will also be seen as illegal and will need to cease. This stops “rescuing”, taking in, saving and rehoming tens of thousands of cats each year by Animal Welfare League NSW, Cat Protection Society NSW, hundreds of Rehoming Organisations and thousands of volunteer community cat carers and rescuers. It will force all stray cats to be delivered to already saturated council pounds, with mass euthanasia at numbers that have not been seen before.
During the Inquiry, there was significant support for proactive cat containment education. However, a number of animal welfare experts objected to mandatory containment, including RSPCA Australia, RSPCA NSW, AWL NSW, CPS NSW, APWF, G2Z.
https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/bills/Pages/bill-details.aspx?pk=18825
https://greens.org.au/nsw/news/media-release/greens-introduce-cat-containment-laws-nsw
https://www.suehigginson.org/support_cat_containment_bill
Further information on the flaws of the Greens bill
For detailed flaws in the bill and associated material, please refer to the following pages:
Save Community Cats 