Ruth Spencer.
The right to roam. For domestic cats, it's just assumed – they've done it for so long it seems an incontrovertible truth of Cathood. They roam to your flowerbed to spend a kitty penny, they roam to your koi pond for a little recreational fishing, they roam
away from their organic venison raw diet to steal the neighbour's Jellimeat - all cat roads lead to roam.
Their wandering rights, however, are under scrutiny: the kind of narrow-eyed, disgusted scrutiny cats are especially good at themselves, particularly when you've just stepped out of the shower and haven't got your towel quite sorted. After a Wellington population of dotterels (possibly some kind of bird? Reptile? Elder folk?) was entirely wiped out by fluffy assassins, their mandate to skulk around unsupervised killing things for fun is starting to garner disapproval.
Cat bans have been in the news since Gareth Morgan first proposed his election-costing conservation plan, Catpocalypse Now. Some moderates favour an indoor-only rule for our adorable furry murderers, which sounds pleasant if you've never been in charge of a litterbox. In the case of the recent musical film, it's not so much a ban we need as a court order to keep CATS 500m away from us at all times. There's no need for that kind of horror to stalk us day or night. We're not dotterels (are they fish?).
There's an average of 220 cats per square kilometre of urban area in New Zealand, which sounds literally enough to carpet it. Half of all households have a cat. Palmerston North's bylaw, the strictest in the country, restricts cat ownership to three per household, as though they were toilet paper at Countdown. It's at once draconian and – to be fair – rather a lot of cats. There's probably a funny story behind the bylaw, involving a crowded house but not Neil Finn.
Can we compromise? There is some precedent for cage-dwelling battery cats. In Brisbane you're supposed to have a wire-fenced enclosure for your cats, a grim feline Grange Hill playground from which they can only stare with longing at potential prey. A depraviary. Of course, "predator" is a relative term in Australia: the birds are still dinosaurs and even a basic spider could quite easily eat your cat. It's a spider-eat-cat world, Australia. One of their people was even in the Cats movie. It's terrifying there.
But people really, really like cats. In kitty cafes, pet-starved apartment dwellers fondle them without the real-ownership hassle of trying to hollow out a Whiskas Temptation to shove in a worming tablet. Kitty videos are the lifeblood of the internet, no matter how many labradoodle owners try to make "doggo" happen. There's even a cat – sorry, turkish angora, according to the press release – called Mittens, nominated for New Zealander of the Year, which just shows that the field is wide open. Marketing gurus in wildlife conservation, for goodness sake find a gregarious tūī to step forward or the battle is already lost. Name it Twittens.
Currently proposed in Wellington is not a Brisbane borstal or a Morgan moratorium but a cat curfew, to keep cats inside from dusk 'til dawn. It worked so well in all those vampire movies, after all. Night stalking curtailed by a bit of duct tape on the catflap, cats will hopefully stop eating dotterels (bats?) and go back to lolling about like the sweet little bundles they appear to be. Don't buy it. Cat owners know a trapped cat is a source of many things but sweet bundleness isn't one of them. With some kind of roaming restriction looking increasingly likely, we can only pray that those enthusiastic medicinal plant people are working on something potent with catnip.
