Something I came across for people thinking about starting a cattery: "You’ll never work longer or harder for so little money, but you’ll never find a more rewarding way to spend your life."
Something that had held true until 2019 when DEFRA released legislation and presided over and were responsible for the largest loss of animal boarding capacity ever recorded.
- The majority of catteries are run by single people or couples serving a local community: DEFRA wrote legislation to prevent catteries from being left unattended - the consequence being that DEFRA mandated all catteries employ third party cover just to go shopping, the gym or go for a meal for the vast majority of catteries.
- DEFRA wrote legislation mandating that catteries who have such low turnovers that they don’t even reach the threshold to pay tax - and DEFRA wrote legislation that could only be resolved by giving business owners the choice of being closed down or passing the unfunded costs onto the public.
- There is a massive difference between running a VAT registered kennels with multiple staff and a cattery with six rooms and yet DEFRA wrote the same rules for both … and none of the regulations consider the quality of animal care or improve animal welfare!
- A small cattery does not get cat food or litter cheaper than the public. A small cattery does not have the money to buy or find space to store a cat weighing machine that they’ll never use any more than they can afford to renovate or remodel every room on the whims of licensing officers.
- It now costs roughly half a million pounds to buy into our industry with the proce of a house included - therefore the vast majority of people with the necessary will and skills to run a boarding establishment for cats, do not have the financial wherewithal to do so.
- Only a select few will ever be interested in trading down to earning seasonal wages below the national minimum wage - Which is why we can’t allow local authorities to bully or close down businesses for leaving a hoover plugged in. We can’t allow local authorities to sacrifice decades of experience to any regulation that wastes time, raises prices for no direct improvement in cat welfare.
- Most people who enter this industry don’t do it because they ran out of career options or got fed up of working in a call centre - it’s often a vocation or a lifelong dream - in our case it was preceded by years of volunteering in multiple areas of cat welfare in different countries so we have access to more useful, varied and different ideas and running our cattery is far more specialised and complex than anyone could imagine when all the variables are considered.
- Very few people who are considering our lifestyle are as pathologically inept or as mentally vacuous as the regulations would suggest. A balance between common sense, hard work and practicality is an entirely sufficient basis to run a good cattery without any regulations.
- There’s been a massive increase in people promoting alternatives to boarding. The very success of unregulated businesses indicates that people are not so infantilised that they require a star system or that licensing or DEFRA’s regulations play any part in their decision.
- DEFRA demanded that we invest in expensive education. Yet everyone in our industry gains more first-hand experience in a year covering hospitality, observational skills, hygiene and cat psychology than the entire board of the CSFG would encounter in a year - The primary vehicle for education is experience and for anything you don’t know there is the internet, support groups and books.
- Finances and efficiencies are the core of every business, but DEFRA wrote legislation that increased operating costs and introduced unnecessary and pointless inefficiencies that would decrease our time spent with the animals - and in many cases made catteries choose between not implementing the regulations or losing their income to employ an extra member of staff to deal with them.
- Catteries do not have spare cash lying around to meet retrospective regulations, we’re lucky to get more than one day a year off and we only survive by providing the best service possible despite all the regulations that prevent us from doing our work.