Attitudes toward cat collar use in central European cat owners—An online survey

Abstract

Collar use in cats is a controversial topic. Cat owners do have very different reasons for either deciding to use a collar on their cat or rejecting collar use. We conducted an online survey on cat management, use of and attitudes toward collars. Our survey participants were mainly women (88.8%), mostly came from Germany (88.2%), and owned 2 ± 2 cats. Collar use was reported by 32.9%. Overall, participants showed significantly higher agreement to the subscale risk perception than to the subscale benefit perception (Z = −56.997, P < 0.001, N = 4940). Participants (N = 318) who reported first-time collar fitting on their cat in the past 2 years used most often plastic breakaway buckles (rounded edges: 44.2%; round with edges inwards: 17.9%; rectangular: 10.4%), non-breakaway buckles were used by 14.4% (plastic: 9.4%; metal: 4.9%). The most common objects attached to the collar were ID tags/tubes (32.4%) and bells (22.1%) and tracker (19.7%). Based on lifetime experience, collar users were older, less often first-time owners, more often allowed their cats free roaming, and had less often professional experience with cats. Agreement to risks was lower than in non-users but still higher than agreement to benefits. In contrast, the perception of benefits outweighed perception of risks in recent collar users. Collar use in the past was strongly associated to risks from entrapment. This suggests that owners are willing to try collars but do not continue to use them over time as they may perceive more risks than benefits.