Thread: Taumarunui golf club cat / Facebook mob

For the purpose of covering my own arse and those of my neighbours where we remove pest cats (trapping & shooting), I took a look at the claim that as companion animals, pet cats have legal protection to trespass onto other people’s properties (see post #5).

Words to this effect can be found on numerous cat enthusiast websites, as well as in some of the media articles about this golf club incident. But it is also mentioned on legal websites:

Community Law
It’s generally accepted that cats are allowed to wander on to other people’s property and that the owner isn’t responsible for any damage they do.

Citizen’s Advice Bureau / Law Society
Cats are allowed to trespass and their owner is usually not liable for damage the cat does to neighbouring property.

Turner Hopkins Legal - Neighbour Law Part 2
Cats - unlike dogs, cats are not closely regulated, and are allowed to trespass. The cat’s owner is not usually liable for any damage made by their cat.


So I went looking for this law, and initially ran into a heap of dead ends as the references all linked to old MPI documents that have been removed.

So I started with the Animal Welfare Act (1999), which uses Codes of Welfare for each animal group. The one that applies to cats was first produced in 2007, but updated and replaced in 2018. All the dead end links point to the 2007 document, and I can’t find that one now.

https://www.mpi.govt.nz/dmsdocument/...Companion-cats

The Code of Welfare: Companion Cats is the legal framework that links back to the Animal Welfare Act. It’s against this code that any legal issues are judged. I haven’t been able to find anything else legal-like that talks about companion cats.

Failure to meet a minimum standard in this Code may be used as evidence to support a prosecution for an offence under the Act.

Anyway, this code makes no reference to cats being allowed to trespass. It may have stated something along these lines in the previous 2007 version, hence the prevalent view online that cats are allowed to trespass.

The NZ Veterinary Association says in its Responsible Companion Cat Ownership policy (2018):

To avoid companion cats having a negative impact on other people, animals and the environment, an owner should:

• not allow cats to stray from their property
• ensure cats do not predate on vulnerable, native wildlife. Measures to reduce predation include the use of deterrent collars, curfews, confinement and the use of cat aviaries.
• ensure cats do not use neighbours’ yards or gardens for toileting

So has something changed? Did they drop the permissible trespass part? The only part of the current code that talks about cats wandering says:

It is strongly recommended that cats are able to be accurately identified in case of loss, or being held in boarding accommodation. Cats are likely to spend some of their time outside of their owner’s legal property boundary. For the purposes of control, it is necessary to be able to identify whether a cat has an owner or not.

If any of you fellas know something about the legalities that I haven’t been able to find yet, then please post it because I would like to know exactly where we stand regarding the removal of pest cats in rural areas. I am specifically interested in this business of cats being legally allowed to trespass with no owner liability, which I have not been able to identify in either the act or the code.