While Ōpōtiki District Council has a register for horses in town, a cat register was considered too big an ask at a meeting on Tuesday.

A request to investigate implementing a cat register was made during the public forum, by Ōhiwa Reserves Care Group’s Meg Collins.

Meg spoke on behalf of the care group, Forest and Bird Eastern Bay, and Ōpōtiki Society for the Care of Animals (OSCA), which supported the submission.

Meg says feral cats are a big problem in the district.

The Ōhiwa Headland Sanctuary project had caught at least 88 feral cats since 2016.

"That’s not counting individual people who have caught cats," she says.

"The SPCA, Predator Free  New Zealand Trust, and Forest and Bird have been working together for the last five years on a plan to register cats. It is well known that cats can be a major predator for our native wildlife, including birds and lizards."

Meg says although a petition had been made to the Government in 2021 for the creation of nationwide cat management legislation that would require cats to be registered, many councils are not waiting around for that to happen.

Of the 61 city and district councils in New Zealand, 25 had brought in regulations to control cats and three – Nelson, Tararua, and Lower Hutt – had done so in the past three months.

"As you will remember, when you were all standing for election, I said to you,' how do you feel about registering cats?' and everyone said, ‘oh, that’s a good idea’," says Meg. "So, let’s start the process."

She says another action that could be taken was when new subdivisions were built near areas that were home to endangered species, it be made a condition of the resource consent that new homeowners not be allowed to have uncontained cats.

Mayor David Moore says he would welcome central government implementing and providing funding to deal with the issue but it was too big a problem for the council to address now.

"We already have enough problems with horses and dogs," he says. 

"It’s not actually the animals that are the problem, it’s the owners."

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.