Cyprus wants a platform for stray animals. Here’s what it needs to work.

In June 2026, a meeting led by the Commissioner for the Environment and Animal Welfare, with the Veterinary Services, the agriculture ministry, the animal police and animal welfare groups, backed a digital platform for managing stray animals. The same meeting backed microchipping neutered street cats and recognising the volunteers who trap and neuter them.

For councils, this matters. You already spend money and staff time on street cats. A good platform could tell you where that money does the most good. A poor one would be another form to fill in.

What councils already do

Cyprus isn’t starting from nothing. Local authorities, welfare groups and vets apply each year to the state’s islandwide neutering programme, through the district veterinary offices.² Some councils run their own drives too: Limassol launched a major neutering drive in November 2025.

But the state programme neuters about 2,200 cats a year,¹ on an island with somewhere around a million or more street cats and no official count. Every cat that’s neutered matters. The hard part is knowing which ones are done, and where to go next.

Five things the platform has to do

1. Count the cats, by area. A council can’t plan for cats it can’t see. The platform needs a picture of where the colonies are and roughly how big they are, kept up to date by the people who meet them.
2. Give every cat one record. A neutered cat should be findable: when, by which vet, who looks after it now. Microchipping helps, but only if the chip links to a record someone can use.
3. Work for the people doing the work. Volunteers do most of the trapping and feeding. If entering a record takes longer than sending a message to a group chat, they won’t do it. The tool has to save them time first.
4. Turn records into numbers councils can use. Colonies, neutering rates, reports of cats in need and shelter space, for your own area, so neutering money goes where the gaps are.
5. Keep the cats safe. A public map of exact colony locations would help the people who harm cats. Numbers should be by area, and exact spots kept to the people who care for them.

Where StrayBond fits

StrayBond is three connected platforms, built in Cyprus around exactly these needs, sharing one record per cat:

• Island of Cats counts the cats. Residents and visitors catch the cats they meet in a free game, and each cat gets its own identity. It’s live in Cyprus today, and shows cats on the map by area only.
• StrayCare is for the people doing the work: colonies, each cat’s health and neutering, and reports of cats in need. It’s in development.
• StrayWatch is for councils: the numbers for your own area, built from the records the other two collect. It’s planned, and we want councils to shape it.

We’re not asking anyone to replace what works. A national platform and the tools people use every day can share data. What matters is that the record of each cat exists, and that it’s kept up by the people who see the cats.

What a council can do now

• Pick a pilot area. One neighbourhood with known colonies is enough to see what the numbers look like.
• Connect us with your volunteers. They know the cats. StrayCare is being built with them.
• Tell us what you need to see. StrayWatch isn’t built yet. The numbers on it should be the ones you’d use.

If you work for a council in Cyprus, email us. We’d like to hear what would help.