Interview! Karen Kraus, Executive Director of the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon, and Bob Sallinger, Conservation Director at the Audubon Society of Portland
August 25, 2018
Interview! Jim Tedford, President & CEO of The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement
September 1, 2018
Do you know what the Five Freedoms are? I find that any time I go to a conference and there are hard questions asked about our work, everyone seems to fall back on the Five Freedoms
They are:
- Freedom from hunger and thirst
- Freedom from discomfort
- Freedom from pain, injury or disease
- Freedom to express normal behavior
- Freedom from fear and distress
These Freedoms were created in 1965 in the U.K. and were initially focused on farm animals and their welfare, but we have been referring to these tenets in the domestic animal welfare world since the late 1990s.
Even before we get into the no-kill/limited admission/open admission conversation these days, it seems that people are asking whether we are providing the Five Freedoms to the cats in our care.
I respect and understand the value of these tenets, but I do wonder how they apply to our community cats. It seems like these cats fall “outside the box” of animal husbandry. Because community cats are free-roaming and we therefore lack the necessary control to ensure that the Five Freedoms are covered for them, then the tenets may not work or even be applicable to their situation.
Can we ensure that our community cats have freedom from hunger and thirst? Freedom from fear and distress? Certainly we have no control over freedom from pain, injury and disease … So there again we are back to that wonderful problem that we have with community cats: how do we know we are doing the best possible job for them? We can’t count them, care for them, contain them and monitor them. Thus, I believe that the Five Freedoms — which have have been the bedrock of our shelter programs and analysis — should be thrown out the door when it comes to community cats. I am going to be bold enough here to propose these Five Community Cat Freedoms instead:
- Freedom to roam
- Freedom to choose food and water
- Freedom from having kittens
- Freedom to choose shelter
- Freedom to allow some supervision and monitoring
These are far simpler “Freedoms” than the original Five, but community cats like to keep it simple. What do you think?
Source: http://aspcapro.org/sites/pro/files/aspca_asv_five_freedoms_final_0_0.pdf
