Thursday, July 21, 2005

Do you know that HDB dwellers are not allowed to have cats as pets?

3 of my lunch mates didn’t know about that until I talked about it over lunch 2 days ago. They were surprised that dogs are allowed but not cats. I have recently commented in Dawn’s blog about the discrimination in the treatment of cats in our public housing policy.

There are 2 archived news (16 May 2002 and 14 Oct 2002) about Cat Welfare Society (CWS)’s proposal and consultations with MND, HDB and other authorities. Personally I feel that the suggestions put up by CWS are sound and can be implemented, especially since CWS is prepared to help HDB to work with residents. Why should we not let the actions of some irresponsible cat owners penalise cat lovers who could provide a good home for cats in their HDB flats? If cats are allowed in flats and there are some people who break the rules, we can educate them and if they are recalcitrant, we can then disallow them to keep cats in their flats. This is more logical than a complete ban of cats in flats. It is ridiculous that most Singaporeans are staying in flats and they can only keep small dogs and not have the options of keeping cats open to them.

If you have any good suggestions that you think CWS could consider adding to their proposal when they float it up to the authorities again, please let me know or forward your comments directly to CWS at info@catwelfare.org. Thanks :)

5 comments:

Dawn said...

Well said!

Anonymous said...

my missus has been getting stonewalls from HDB on this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/mrsbudak/49229.html. Someone up there must really hate cats.
-budak-

Anonymous said...

Hi! Thanks for commenting in my blog! There was no particular complaint; I merely wrote in to ask whether there were any change in HDB's policy after CWS's proposal. I suspect HDB's reply was a standard one it uses whenever cat lovers write in about keeping cats in HDB flats.

We currently do not own cats but we're looking into adopting one. When we do, the cat will be an indoor cat - no roaming outside for sure. That makes choosing a docile cat really important.

coboypb said...

Oh I see. You most probably know your dream cat is among the lovely cats @ CWS Public Adoption Bulletin Board (http://www.catwelfare.org/page/id/27) and SPCA (http://www.spca.org.sg/adoption/adoption.asp)
Update us when you find your feline friend :)

Anonymous said...

Here's our new addition to the family, Angel:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mrsbudak/134573.html