This video tells the real story between Ms. Li and GreatBay_China, it starts with Rocky on his way to interview Aunt Li and ends with Aunt Li’s future expectations and how we helped her.

GBC Documentary P0

The stray cats are indeed a non-negligible problem in many parts of the world, bringing in serious outcomes and the current solutions to it are not very efficient. To know more, please check the next episode.

‘Make it work, make it fast, make it beautiful.’ —Yu Li

Although we did not follow our first prototype when materializing the Kitty Wonderland, her advice to a large extent prompt our process in hardware construction.

To remove this liability and improve safety factors, we finalized our cat-attracting system as a bottle of extracted essential oil and a fan to spread the odor that obviously increases the safety and ethical factor.

Safety issues have always been our first consideration; since we were, then, planning to use a plate with living organisms in, the device must be constructed deliberately and safely to prevent any leak possible. One of our public engagement presented the answer to us. On July 6th, our first presentation, also being our first event facing the public, took place at X.factor. This presentation, free in the boundary of age, background, or academic level, had brought us waves of brand new ideas that all enlightens us with revolutionary designs. Yet one of them, coming from a university student majoring in psychology, remained distinctively important and profoundly impactive:

‘We all concerns of safety affairs; So, instead of using living organisms, I would suggest a cell-free construction’ — Yue Wu

He thereby insists wood as the building material which provides a safe environment, sustainable residential area, and operational structure. Following his idea, we thus determined the building material and started our materializing campaign. This design bestowed a greater sustainability to our product, since now we are using a long-lasting and sediment material for constructing, which enhances the safety of household provided to cats. For further design and construction, see product design.

Video: we collaborated with professional designers in a maker space—X factory to consolidate our design of the ‘kitty wonderland’. We have made several improvements.

GBC Documentary P3

But what about the safety concerns? Please check the next episode. The previous episode is about connecting out lab project to stray cat rescue.

‘Cats will fight back wildly after being captured. Sometimes hurting themselves severely.’ — Mr.Huang

This raises our alert as the safety of cats are unconsciously threatened. Again, a change is introduced to our KW, which discards its auto closed door, and replaced with a surveillance camera and remote control door. By this course, we can detect whether is cat attracted inside the house, and thereby to close the door or not. Some other improvements are made in order to enhance the safety level of our product; details could be found in both our safety form and applied design page. (See Safety) Such improvement lately allowed us to conduct our final investigation of the behavior of cats smoothly.

We brought our final version of Kitty Wonderland to a makers fair and held out public engagement with. See further details in our public engagement page.

Government opinion

To verify the practicality of our Kitty wonderland, our team draw out a plan of investigating the behavior of stray cats to Kitty Wonderland. Confident in what we have already studied, one last step is to receive permission from governing bodies. One of our team members carried out a close interview to the multiple governing bodies related to the location of our Kitty Wonderland. This includes: Shenzhen Agricultural Science and Technology Promotion Center, Urban management bureau, street offices, community management office and residential estate management office. Among them, the urban management office gave specific advice that we need to ask permission to deploy our hardware, we should ask the administrator of a very area where we plan on placing our cat house. Though not all of those governing bodies gave clear concur to the put in of our Kitty Wonderland, the law enforcement team and Shenzhen Agricultural Science and Technology Promotion Center did. The Promotion Center suggests that the Chinese government has no regulations about the GMO (genetically modified organism) part of our project, and the main concerns of the governing body is biosafety. The rest of the governmental offices encouraged our project by providing us contact information of relating organs.

The order which we interviewed the relating governing bodies.

Conclusion

Having conducted all these research listed above, we can draw some conclusions.

First of all, a hardware like “the Kitty Wonderland” is something very needed by the animal rescue teams. From dedicated individuals to animal protection association officials, the same problems of high alertness of the feral cats preventing the effective execution of street animal managing measures like TNR kept being reported. And it was the very key impeding the rescuing of feral cats.

However, the incorporation of synthetic biology into such a hardware requires careful and sensible design, in which biosafety was the top concern. People are worried by the fact that genetically engineered microorganisms would be placed somewhere outside the laboratory. And this opinion has helped us to make an ethical decision by replacing the actual microbial culture, what we initially wanted to place in the hardware, by the aseptic nepetalactol extraction produced by those microbes.

Moreover, since the hardware is to be placed in the public area, a number of other designs for practicability are also needed. We have to make the hardware durable in all kinds of environment, and appealing for cats. We must also pay attention to how to prevent vandalism towards the cat shelter, which is to be achieved by public education on respecting and caring for animals.

The government has either encouraged nor discouraged the placement of cat shelter, but we were informed that whether we could actually place the cat shelter in the future is dependent on the opinions of individual management. So far, all managements we inquired have supported this idea.

We are also aware through conversations with multiple organizations including iGEM HQ and Safety Committee that at this moment we are not yet prepared to conduct the animal experiment. So we followed this instruction and have not performed any test using cat attractants like catnip.