Public Opinion On Stray Cat Management In China

Unmanaged stray cat populations pose a challenge for communities worldwide: stray cats face health issues, affect local wild animals such as birds, and impact public health and sanitation. Effectively managing stray cat populations is necessary for human and animal communities to live together safely, but public support is critical in these efforts.

In this research, the authors studied public opinion on stray cats and ways to manage them, using social media data collected from Weibo, a popular social media platform in China. Using a mixture of manual evaluation and statistical language processing approaches, the authors studied nearly 90,000 posts about stray cats on the platform.

From this analysis, five primary topics emerged. The first topic was human-stray cat interactions (25.5% of posts) which included posts about humans approaching stray cats, feeding stray cats, and stray cats attacking humans. The second topic was animal welfare (7.5%), where posts focused on stray cats’ physical and living conditions. The third topic was public nuisances (3%), including posts about public sanitation, health, and stray cat noise. The fourth topic included the ecological impacts (1%) related to stray cats. The fifth topic was actions to be taken (21%), which consisted of posts about caring for stray cats, adoption, lethal control methods, and trap-neuter-return approaches.

With these topics, the authors did an additional analysis on how much discussion a post generated. They found that ecological impact and public nuisance posts generated the most discussion. The trap-neuter-return approach also generated more discussion than lethal control methods such as euthanasia. However, people discussing the ecological impacts of stray cats were more likely to discuss lethal control methods.

The final analysis of the data focused on sentiment analysis. This approach classifies whether a post has negative or positive emotions. Positive emotions were associated with humans approaching stray cats, caring for stray cats, stray cat adoptions, and trap-neuter-return. Negative emotions were associated with stray cats attacking humans, public sanitation, public health, cats making noise, ecological impacts, and lethal control methods.

Based on the analysis, the authors propose three areas of management policy focus. The first is communicating the negative aspects of stray cat feeding behaviors. Their research suggests that posts about giving food to stray cats were negatively related to calls for stray cat care and stray cat adoptions. The second is to raise ecological awareness campaigns highlighting stray cats’ environmental impact. Posts about ecological impact generated the highest discussion despite being a low overall percentage of posts. The third is to understand citizens’ perceptions toward different management control methods. Lethal control methods were positively related to ecological impact discussions. This suggests people with ecological concerns are more open to lethal control methods. However, overall views of lethal methods were negative, with trap-neuter-return receiving more positive support.

The positive emotions and support for trap-neuter-return approaches suggest an opportunity for animal advocates to push for alternatives to lethal population control methods. However, the results suggest that animal advocates must also proactively engage environmental conservationists. Carefully framing messaging around ecological impacts is especially important, as that concern was related to using lethal control methods. In contrast with the authors’ suggestion, animal advocates may want to focus less on ecological impacts overall if the goal is to avoid support for lethal population management.

This research explains how the public feels about stray cats and potential population management. By understanding the public, animal advocates can produce better proposals for stray cat management. However, this research only includes data from Chinese people in a Chinese context. Therefore, adjustments to local contexts should be studied and adapted accordingly.