One of the unexpected pleasures of leading Cats Protection has been discovering just how much there is still to learn.
People sometimes assume that when someone becomes the Chief Executive of a charity, they somehow become an expert overnight in whatever that organisation exists to do. The reality is rather different. I arrived with many years of experience of leading charities, building partnerships, governing organisations and trying to make finite resources achieve extraordinary things. Those skills transfer remarkably well. Expertise in cat welfare, however, most certainly does not.
Like anyone joining a specialist organisation, I have found myself surrounded by people who know far more than I do. That expertise certainly includes our outstanding veterinary team, but it extends much further than that. It resides in more than 1,000 dedicated colleagues and over 10,000 volunteers, many of whom have spent decades caring for cats, supporting owners, running branches and centres, managing community cats, undertaking Trap, Neuter and Return programmes, raising funds, educating the public and quietly accumulating an extraordinary depth of practical wisdom. Every visit I make, every conversation I have and every centre or branch I spend time in leaves me understanding the subject just a little better.
One of my earliest lessons was delightfully humbling.
I’ve shared my home with cats for most of my adult life and, without ever really thinking about it, I always put the food bowl and the water bowl next to each other. It seemed the obvious thing to do. After all, that’s what most of us would probably do for ourselves.
One of our feline behaviour experts gently explained why many cats would prefer exactly the opposite. In the wild, food and water sources are rarely found together, and many cats are instinctively more comfortable drinking away from where they eat. It wasn’t exactly a life-changing revelation, but I went home, moved Blenheim’s water bowl to the other side of the kitchen and, almost immediately, noticed he was drinking more frequently.
It was a wonderfully simple reminder that a lifetime of living with cats is not the same as understanding cats. Owning cats gives us experience; studying their behaviour, physiology and welfare over many years gives quite a different depth of knowledge. One of the privileges of leading Cats Protection is being surrounded by people with that expertise, and discovering just how much there still is to learn.
Before joining Cats Protection, I suspect I unconsciously thought there was one ideal outcome for every cat: life as a family pet. I now appreciate that the picture is much more nuanced.
Every cat matters, whether living in a home, on a farm, alongside a community or independently as a feral cat. Good welfare does not depend on every cat living the same kind of life; it depends on whether their physical, behavioural and social needs are being met.
At either end of the spectrum, the answers are often relatively straightforward. A well-socialised pet cat will usually thrive in a domestic home, while a genuinely feral cat may be best left in its familiar environment, supported through appropriate interventions such as Trap, Neuter and Return rather than attempts at domestication.
The real challenge lies with the many cats in between. Cats that have had some experience of people but remain wary; cats that might adapt to a home with patience and understanding; cats that may be happier living on a smallholding or farm than in a suburban sitting room; cats whose ideal future depends as much on the people available to care for them as on the cats themselves. There are remarkably few absolutes. Understanding where each individual cat sits on that spectrum requires knowledge, experience and careful judgement.
That lesson alone changed the way I think about our work. It also made me rather less comfortable with one of the words most commonly associated with animal welfare charities: rescue.
I understand why we use it, and there are undoubtedly occasions when it is entirely appropriate. Yet it can also imply that organisations like ours are the heroes of the story while everyone else has somehow failed. The reality is usually much more human than that. Cats come into our care because an owner has died, become ill, lost their home, experienced financial hardship or reached a point where they can no longer provide the care their cat deserves. Seeking help in those circumstances is not failure; it is often an act of responsibility and compassion. Our role is not to judge or to seek credit. It is to serve cats and the people who care about them, recognising that their welfare is often deeply intertwined.
Another area where my understanding has grown enormously is neutering. Like many people, I knew it prevented unwanted litters. What I hadn’t appreciated was quite how profound its long-term impact is, nor how complex it can be to deliver effectively. Veterinary capacity, affordability, geography, awareness and local circumstances all influence whether owners are able to access neutering for their cats. In some places the greatest need lies with owned cats; elsewhere it may be among free-living populations. Doing more of the same everywhere is rarely the answer. Doing the right thing, in the right place and at the right time is.
Those conversations have also introduced me to a way of thinking about our work that I find increasingly compelling: the idea of a balanced cat population.
This isn’t a new organisational strategy, nor is it a slogan. Rather, it is a way of describing the conditions in which cats are most likely to flourish. A balanced cat population is one where cats experience good welfare throughout their lives, owners are supported to meet their cats’ needs, preventable suffering is reduced and the overall number of cats is broadly in balance with the homes, veterinary services and other resources available to care for them.
Thinking in those terms encourages us to lift our eyes from the individual cat in front of us and ask a wider question. What kind of future are we helping to create for cats as a whole?
That question also helps illuminate one of the greatest challenges of leading any charity. The need is almost always greater than the resources available to meet it. Every day, organisations like ours make difficult decisions about where people, money and effort can make the greatest difference. That is never simply an exercise in budgeting; it is an exercise in ethics. Every pound spent in one place is a pound unavailable somewhere else, and every decision has an opportunity cost. It is precisely because resources are finite that we have a responsibility to use evidence, research and good judgement to guide where we focus our efforts.
That does not mean narrowing our view to only the most immediate or visible forms of need. Some of our work can seem, at first glance, to sit at the edges of what people might expect from a cat welfare charity. Our Lifeline service, for example, helps people escaping domestic abuse by ensuring that concern for a much-loved cat does not become a barrier to finding safety. Our contribution to the restoration of the Scottish wildcat reflects a different, but equally important, responsibility: helping secure the future of Britain’s last remaining native wild cat. Alongside these sit our education programmes, our research, our policy work and our partnerships with many other organisations. None of these are “nice to haves”. They are all part of a coherent picture of what it means to improve cat welfare, not just today but for future generations.
Prioritisation, then, is not about valuing one cat, one programme or one form of welfare above another. It is about understanding how the different parts of our work complement one another and using our resources where they can make the greatest overall difference. Sometimes that means responding to immediate need. Sometimes it means preventing tomorrow’s problems. Often it means doing both at the same time.
Perhaps the greatest surprise for me has been the richness and complexity of the wider cat welfare landscape. Across the country there are hundreds of charities, rescue organisations, veterinary practices, community groups and dedicated individuals doing extraordinary work for cats. Most exist because someone saw a need and simply decided to help. Together they represent an enormous reservoir of compassion and expertise.
Like many parts of the voluntary sector, however, animal welfare organisations operate in a world of finite funding, local loyalties, different philosophies and strong identities. That can sometimes make partnership more difficult than any of us would wish, even when everyone shares the same ultimate objective. Yet the more I learn, the more convinced I become that collaboration is one of the greatest opportunities available to us. One of the things that continues to impress me about Cats Protection is its determination to work alongside others rather than apart from them. Whether partnering with veterinary practices, local authorities, housing providers, community organisations or other charities, we increasingly recognise that no single organisation can create the future we all want to see. Cats neither know nor care whose logo appears on the leaflet; they simply benefit when we work together.
The more I understand about cat welfare, the more I realise how much there is still to discover. Every conversation with colleagues or volunteers reveals another layer of complexity. What first appears to be a straightforward question usually turns out to have several perfectly reasonable answers.
For me, that is what the idea of a balanced cat population ultimately represents. It reminds us that our purpose is larger than rehoming a single cat or delivering a single service, important though those things will always remain. It encourages us to think about prevention alongside intervention, about systems as well as individual cases, and about partnership rather than ownership.
I still smile when I see Blenheim wander across the kitchen to drink from a water bowl that now sits several feet from where he eats. It’s a tiny detail in the grand scheme of cat welfare, but it has become a quiet reminder to me that expertise matters, curiosity matters and that good leaders are often those who are willing to change their minds when presented with better evidence.
In Cats Protection, I have the privilege of working alongside more than 11,000 people who understand cats better than I ever will. My role is not to compete with that expertise, but to listen to it, learn from it and help create the conditions in which it can make the greatest possible difference to the cats, and the people, we exist to serve.
