![Stray cats](https://one-voice.fr/app/uploads/2023/09/One_Voice_Chat.jpg)
![Stray cats](https://one-voice.fr/app/uploads/2023/09/One_Voice_Chat.jpg)
Stray cats
Cats without families, a life of wandering
In France, 11 million homeless cats roam the streets of our towns and countryside. Faced with the cold, hunger, disease and violence outside, they struggle to survive, but their life expectancy is barely more than five years, compared with fifteen years when they are surrounded by a family.
One Voice has been fighting against feline straying for years. Our investigations enable us to denounce this problem and reveal all its perverse effects. Our Chatipi programme is a practical response to the needs of stray cats and the prejudice they are also the victims of: these refuges deployed throughout France provide them with shelter, care and safety, and offer information to the public.
Why are we fighting feline straying?
Lives of misery
Contrary to popular belief, a stray cat’s life is neither free nor happy! Their daily lives are full of pitfalls. Every day, they have to find food and water on their own, and protect themselves from other cats, dogs and humans who hunt them with guns, stone them, burn them or poison them. Deprived of care, these “homeless” cats are also victims of numerous diseases (FIV, leucosis, typhus, coryza…).
A law that changes nothing
The law against animal abuse passed in 2021 should have changed their fate, but the resources available have not matched the ambitions. When you consider that 10,000 kittens can be born from one cat and her offspring in seven years, sterilisation campaigns are the only effective way of curbing suffering and preserving biodiversity, a collateral victim of feline straying. Many European countries are implementing them. This is the case in Greece, Luxembourg, Belgium… France is turning a blind eye, a criminal apathy.
In the pound: death, out of sight
In 2023, our long-term investigation in several French pounds proved it: once captured, stray cats are ruthlessly crammed onto shelves, in their transport crates, deprived of care and affection before being killed after eight days to make room for the next ones. These mass slaughters are funded by our taxes, when public money should be used for prevention through birth control, the only effective solution to stem the tide of abandoned and stray cats. To put an end to this suffering, we need to make it compulsory to sterilise cats, as it is already compulsory to identify them.
Chatipi, a lasting solution to the vicious circle of feline straying
One Voice is setting up three-way partnerships with municipalities or living areas and local associations to identify, sterilise and release homeless cats by providing them with a wooden chalet to hydrate, feed and comfort themselves. The aim of this ethical scheme is to create spaces for stray cats so that they can be rescued, while at the same time raising public awareness of their distress and needs. More than fifty Chatipis have been set up in France or are in the process of being deployed.
Key figures
An alarming fact
Our proposals
- An emergency plan to make the sterilisation of cats compulsory.
- Controlling the trade in dogs and cats. The commoditisation of our companions leads to impulse buying and is responsible for abandonment.
History