Community cat website documents over 100 cat personalities and approximate locations

A website featuring a crowd-sourced map of over 100 community cats intends to raise awareness and empathy for the felines by documenting them.

Created by Reddit user T-Rekt_Games, the Cats of SG site collects information on their approximate locations and personalities, and was publicised on Reddit on Monday (Jan 16).

In the Reddit post, Original Poster (OP) T-Rekt_Games explained the motivations for creating the site: “I thought it would be good for people to know more about some of the wonderful cats that live with us, as well as their different personalities.”

The updated map within the site does not display the exact location of any cat. 

Instead, Cats of SG collects information about the community these cats belong to. After that, the site will generate a random location within the region it stays in (North, North-East, East, Central, West) and place the cat’s icon there. 

For instance, a cat in Bedok would be categorised as living in the East, and its icon will be placed randomly in the map’s East region.

Every submission is manually checked before being displayed on the map, and the approval process could take up to three working days.

These random locations used to position the cats on the map will regenerate every time the map is refreshed.

Upon clicking on a cat icon, a cat’s name and image will be displayed, and users can then opt to view more information about them, such as the region the cat stays in, its gender, personality, likes and dislikes.

Besides the map, a photo gallery of community cats and other information about them can be found within the site, such as who the community cats are, whether they are friendly and how members of the public can help them out.

Initially, several Redditors stated their disapproval and concerns as the original map would inform users of the area these cats stayed at, and the background of the images could reveal their specific location within that area. 

“They could use the background of the cats’ pictures to identify the location of the cats, and spend an indefinite amount of time finding them,” said a Redditor worried about potential abusers taking advantage of the site to locate and harm the animals.

OP T-Rekt_Games responded with an update on the original post, saying that these issues were addressed with the removal of communities from the map to display only general regions, as well as blurring out recognisable backgrounds of images.

“While these changes make the map less accurate, they also help ensure that no one will be able to use the map to locate a cat,” wrote T-Rekt_Games.

The original post has since been deleted as the image within did not have these blurred backgrounds, and the updated post can be found here.