B.C. residents may no longer be able to buy exotic pet wildcats.
The province announced on Tuesday (July 8) that it is considering a ban on the sale, breeding and future ownership of all non-native and non-domestic cat species.
The B.C. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BC SPCA) has long advocated for this rule change.
Sara Dubois, the BC SPCA's senior director for standards, science and policy, told Black Press Media the organization has seen issues with animals such as Asian leopard cats and caracals result in animal cruelty investigations and seizures.
"These are not pets, and they have to be placed in very unique sanctuaries in the U.S.," she said.
The Vancouver Humane Society wants new regulations to go a step further and ban all exotic pets, saying non-domesticated animals have complex needs they retain from the wild.
"It's incredibly difficult to meet their needs when they're kept captive," said Emily Pickett, the campaign director for the Humane Society.
But one Vancouver Island breeder of African serval cats tells Black Press Media that problems arise from poor owners.
"It's sad for people who really take care of them," said Catherine Joyal of Savannah Canada in Sooke.
The province already limits ownership of tigers, lions, jaguars, leopards and cheetahs. These proposed regulations would add servals, caracals, ocelots, European and African wildcats, Asian golden cats, fishing cats, jungle cats and marbled cats to the list.
B.C. instituted the ban on large cat ownership in 2010, becoming the first province in Canada to create this sort of regulation. This included cats and large snakes such as anacondas. The rules were a response to the 2007 killing of a woman by a Siberian tiger at an exotic animal farm in 100 Mile House.
To regulate these animals, B.C. added them to the Controlled Alien Species Regulation, which lists species that are not permitted to be pets in the province without a permit under the Wildlife Act. Owners were able to apply for a permit to keep the animals they currently owned as long as certain conditions for care were met. The sale, breeding and importing of large cats was banned.
If the province decides to move forward with the new regulations, the same criteria would be applied to the smaller wildcats.
The BC SPCA led the push for the first regulations and is continuing to promote the expansion to include all exotic wildcats.
Dubois said the list created in 2010 was too limited.
As those 100-pound animals were prohibited, people switched to other, smaller wildcats. Dubois said the BC SPCA still finds many of these animals in poor health, and they can still pose a threat to small children or other pets.
"I would still consider a 40-pound wild serval from the plains of Africa a dangerous cat," she said.
A breeder's perspective
While there have been multiple incidents of escaped servals on Vancouver Island, Joyal blames improper care. She said there needs to be indoor and outdoor enclosures, and the animals can't be left to roam around a home.
"Those cats can destroy a house in half an hour if they are not trained properly," she said.
Joyal has owned and bred her cats for about 10 years, and owns two pairs of servals.
She said she did have one cat escape in 2022 after an issue with a door. That cat was loose for a couple of days, and she said no people or pets were hurt.
There was a more recent report from Sooke last New Year's Day of a serval attacking and killing a stray cat and possibly killing someone's pet cat. Joyal said none of her cats were missing at that time, and she disputes the evidence that a serval was responsible in those cases.
Joyal sells about four serval kittens per year, and also breeds them with domestic cats. Those domestic mixes she calls "Savannah cats," which she said are more like normal house cats. The hybrids would not be banned under the proposed regulation changes, though breeding with servals would be.
Some of her cats are already generations apart from the servals, so these would be allowed to continue being bred.
If the new regulations prevent her from breeding more servals, she said she hopes to be grandfathered in so she can at least keep the ones she already has as pets.
Joyal called the new rules unfortunate, but added that ultimately, "it is what it is."
Animal rights groups want to go further
The humane society's Pickett said that while she hopes the new regulations are adopted, she thinks they are too focused on animals that can be a threat and ought to be expanded to all exotic species.
Many types of animals are unable to have their social, behavioural and psychological needs met in captivity, she said.
She advocated for the use of a scoring system that uses evidence-based criteria to determine what kinds of animals have been proven to thrive in human care, such as domesticated rabbits, and which have not, such as iguanas.
"It's almost impossible to replicate their natural habitat when they're kept captive as pets; they're unable to engage in those natural behaviours that are instinctive for them," she said.
The Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship is still engaging with the public on the proposed changes and is accepting comments and questions at controlledalienspecies@gov.bc.ca. The ministry has not yet decided on a timeline for the engagement process.
