Study of factors that may predispose domestic cats to road traffic accidents: part 1

Between March 2000 and February 2001, six veterinary practices in Cambridgeshire collected data on 117 owned cats which they had examined after a road accident. For one week every month during the same year, the practices distributed questionnaires to the owners of cats which had been examined for reasons other than a road accident, and the data from these cats were checked to ensure that they were representative of the practice records, which were compared with a survey of the owned cat population for age and sex. From this population, the cats that were allowed outdoors and had never been in a road accident were chosen as controls, and compared with the cats that had been in a road accident for age, sex, pedigree status and coat colour. The cats that had been in a road accident differed from the control population with respect to age, sex and pedigree status; for every one-year increase in age, the odds of a road accident decreased by 16 per cent; the odds for males (entire and neutered) being in a road accident were 1.9 times the odds for females (entire and neutered), and the odds for pedigree cats were 0.29 those for non-pedigree cats.