Cat Health

This is a national dilemma, but every day hundreds of cats are killed on our nation's roads. Fact! So how do we prevent our beloved pet cats from becoming another road traffic statistic?

A few years ago we moved into a quiet suburban area which backed onto a relatively busy road, but when our daughter begged us for a kitten it was too difficult to deny her. Her first kitten brought her much happiness until one night a few months later she didn't come home, the next day we found her kitten her lying squashed by the road only a 100 yards away from home. Once we had all recovered from these sad times I promised her another cat as long as I could cat-proof our garden.

I started to research cat containment products for a solution, this was obviously a huge problem as each day we were getting phone calls from other worried cat owners about the best way to contain a cat?

As our garden was contained by walls and fencing at the rear of the property I didn't think this would be too much of a problem, so agreed to my daughter having a new kitten called Maisie. I thought by the time she would be allowed out that I would have a cat proof garden. My first investment was to buy a reel of netting and some wooden stakes which I screwed to the fences and walls, after a weekend of fixing these you can imagine my dismay when within a week the cat just scaled straight up and over. Not to be out manoeuvred so easily I decided that my netting needed to be angled inwards at the top of the fence, so I quickly had some angled brackets made at a friend's engineering works and set aside another day to install.

This seemed highly successful and I was really pleased with my handiwork as the cat seemed beaten at last, that is until the cat decided to scale some 30ft fir trees at the end of the garden. Having spent over