Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The aim of this study was to see if there is any group of cats that are at greater risk to get sick and/or be euthanized during their stay at a cat shelter with no-kill policy. The study was conducted at Åkeshov cat rescue center in Sweden and cats that entered the center between the 1th of June 2010 and the 31th of December 2011 was used in the study. This study focused on factors regarding gender, origin, level of socialization, incubation period and the proportion of euthanized cats. In this study, the kind of illness weren’t taken into account.

This study showed that the gender of the cat didn´t affect the risk for illness. The level of socialization had little to do with the risk of illness while origin did affect the risk. An example of this was the cats that are being seized by the police or by the animal control officer, that were at a higher risk to get sick, probably because these cats haven’t been held under optimal conditions.

The majority of cats that entered the shelter were already sick on arrival, but the results of this study also showed that cats do get sick during their stay at the shelter. It´s therefore important to work with disease control to insure that as few cats as possible get sick during their stay at the shelter since illness do affect the cat’s welfare.

Åkeshov cat rescue center is a shelter with a no-kill policy. They only euthanize the cats that the veterinarian thinks are in a very bad condition, this resulted in a very low euthanization rate. At Åkeshov only 9 % of the total number of cats that entered the shelter was thought to be in such bad condition that they had to be euthanized.