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Study of factors that may predispose domestic cats to road traffic accidents: part 1
Author(s) -
Rochlitz I.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
veterinary record
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.261
H-Index - 99
eISSN - 2042-7670
pISSN - 0042-4900
DOI - 10.1136/vr.153.18.549
Subject(s) - cats , odds , odds ratio , demography , population , medicine , environmental health , veterinary medicine , logistic regression , sociology
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.