{{U}}The steadily growing number of single-person households in Britain has raised plenty of troubling issues—how to build enough dwellings to accommodate them, what to do about the decline in traditional family cohesion—to keep planners and sociologists busy{{/U}}. But one as yet unstudied side- effect of this social trend appears to be an explosion in the cat population.
The Pet Food Manufacturers' Association reckons that the number of dogs has declined from a peak of 7.4 million in 1990 to 6.5 million now. (47){{U}}Meanwhile the domestic cat population has risen steadily, overtaking dog numbers in 1993 to stand now at about 8 million, twice as many as there were in 1965.{{/U}} Changing life-styles, more than anything else, are responsible for this. (48){{U}}More single-person households and more married women at work means that fewer households are able to give a dog the walks and other attention it needs{{/U}}. Cats, on the other hand, apart from daily feeding, can be left pretty much to their own devices.
Which also means that they sometimes wander off in search of a better place to stay if the mood takes them. This causes another problem: feral eats. (49){{U}}As cats are harder to round up than dogs, and breed prolifically—a pair can produce ten offspring a year—large colonies of 80 or so cats hiding out in disused buildings are increasingly common{{/U}}. While the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals and the Cat Protection League re-house about 125,000 lost or unwanted cats a year, the League guesses that there may be about 1.2m wild cats in Britain.
(50){{U}}If they are not a nuisance the animal charities neuter the ones they can catch and then leave them alone{{/U}}. Animal-lovers are pleased. Bird-lovers are not. They blame cats for the sharp decline in the number of small birds in Britain. The League, however, has an. idea for making wild cats socially useful. It tries to persuade farmers and garden centres to take them on as environmentally-friendly rat- catchers. A bunch of neutered, wild cats could well be an efficient way of controlling a potentially plague of rats and mice.