This was my family when I was a kid. We never had a cat for more than 2-5 years because there were coyotes and pumas out there. Except for one cat who lived to old age. I think we had a dozen cats during my childhood. I remember thinking they were happier with their freedom, even though it meant their lives were short.
I know better now. I still think cats are happier when they can go outside, but it’s not worth the risk to their lives and also the lives of the local smaller wildlife.
We let our cats in the garden supervised if they want but they’re indoor cats otherwise. One will go out for a short time and come back in if we go in, and the other one has absolutely no interest in going out and would rather cosey up on my pillow.
They’re both elderly but have been that way since they were kittens/rescued.
We got them harnesses so we could take them out and see stuff but they weren’t all that into it.
We have puzzle games and plenty of toys for them. The oldest loves a puzzle and can out maneuver our dog at them, but the younger one has a single braincell and is as dumb as a box of rocks. She’s happy just to sit to your lap and get pets.
I think the risk can be weighed and mitigated. Coyotes mainly come out at night, and you can keep a cat indoors at night. If every new cat gets promptly snapped up anyway, maybe it’s just not a safe enough area.
Honest question, how do you keep a cat indoors at night? We used to call them, but sometimes they wouldn’t show up. That meant you might see them the next day, or never again. One little poofy grey cat we had disappeared for a week before turning up soaking wet and meowing frantically. Cats are quick and can make pretty good distance from your house, so when you’re calling them in for the night, they could be literally anywhere. They also like to hunt at sunset, so might just ignore you on purpose.
That’s my experience anyways. I think some of the other comments here are right, that a limited outdoor space that they could enjoy but not escape from would be ideal. I don’t have a yard so my cats are indoor only. I did try to leash-train the smarter one but she was not having it.
edit: we would clang their food dishes and shake the food bags. Calling them in for the night was also feeding time. My experience was that despite this they wouldn’t show up sometimes.
I remember thinking they were happier with their freedom, even though it meant their lives were short.
I know better now.
You can be trapped in the most luxurious palace, with your every want attended to, but you cannot leave.
Or, you can be free to go where you please, still have your wants attended to, but there is a chance you will die young and the last hour of your life will be spent in terror and excruciating pain.
Which do you choose?
Honestly a bit of a tough question. I’m not sure, myself.
Interesting concept but cats don’t have the sapience to understand the risk involved with being outside. You could say the same thing about children, but because adults know better we don’t let them do whatever they please.
Mine started life as an indoor cat, but after we put in a dog door for the pups there was no chance. She figured it out by watching them and lets herself out for the occasional prowl (around 4-6 hours a day, she usually goes no farther than the neighbors yard). She doesn’t stay out overnight though, she’d rather sleep inside with her dog.
It breaks my heart with how many irresponsible pet owners there are. There’s no good reason to let your cat outside. People who can’t accept that shouldn’t have cats.
Not all places in the world have coyotes. Some places are safe for cats. I don’t have cats, but there are several out-doors cats where I live that seems to be doing just fine.
Until they get hit by a car. Or wander into the wrong yard and get killed by a dog. I see more dead cats on the side of the freeway/highway than any other animal by far.
I just lost my very beloved barn cat to a suspected coyote attack.
It really sucks. He was a feral cat not deemed suitable for a home and he went from hissing at me for weeks to a total cuddly love…with a wild wall climbing streak.
He knew love, friendship, a warm bed and a full belly but the guilt I have is all consuming. He lived a great life but man…my barn feels very sad and quiet these days.
It really sounds like you gave him a great life that nobody else would have. Without you they would have died a feral cat only knowing struggle within the unending fight for food and warmth. With you they got to know love and got to leave all that struggle behind. You did good.
Sells the joke better. If you split the sentence into clauses, using commas, then you give the brain a little rest and it would get to the punchline before you read it.
“Who cares if its legible” set my brain up to expect satire and I failed to properly interpret the rest of the sentence it to think message weren’t a verb but noun.
We’ve got two blind cats. They’re indoor, but we take them in the yard and let them do their thing under supervision. Trying to catch bugs will usually just end up in a bee sting, and catching small game is largely out of the question. Tho they have chased deer away.
The coyotes around me are massive. I thought I was seeing things one night as a big ass German Shepard sized dog walked cross my yard.
Two things can be true. It is objectively cruel to constrain a being to a small, understimulating space. It is also cruel to give preferential treatment to a predator which will ruin local natural balance. Same as it’s cruel of hunters to feed animals during the winter and general tough times so they have more prey to hunt later.
Or, leash train it and provide appropriate supervised enrichment for the cat instead of letting it run loose, just like dog owners are expected to do with dogs. Cats don’t need to roam outdoors unsupervised any more than dogs do.
It depends on where you live. If you live in a city without predators, then letting your cat go outside in the backyard gives them a very exciting experience. If you live somewhere with coyotes, then your cat is going to die.
Outdoor cats have a shorter average life span in cities, too. One big cause is cars. Also, it’s worth noting that house cats are essentially an invasive species and do a lot of damage to bird populations.
It’s pretty widely recommended to keep cats indoors.
It probably does happen occasionally on accident, like hunting dogs that pick up an interesting scent and then get lost, but I’ve never met a good pet owner who’s pet ran away. It’s always the guy who locked his dog in the backyard 16 hours a day and never thought of them as family, or the cat owner who put the car on a starvation diet hoping it would catch mice.
Well you also haven’t intentionally looked into it, this is just your random experience; and since other people here are offering ADDITIONAL experience where those things DID happen, maybe you should fucking take that into account too. Or do you prefer only to learn from mistakes that you make personally?
That’s good, in that sense your yard is essentially acting as an enclosure. Unfortunately most cats don’t only stay in the back yard, and in those cases the owner should either cat-proof their yard to keep the cat inside it, or keep their cat inside their home unless walking them on a leash.
If you’re in an environment where cats are not natural and are invasive, don’t buy cats. Keeping them indoors isn’t a solution. It’s cruel for the cat unless you have an environment specifically set up to house them. All these problems come from people having cats in places they aren’t native and shouldn’t be to begin with.
If you’re in an environment where cats are not natural and are invasive
There’s no such thing. Cats are a domesticated species, they aren’t native to anywhere. Their ancestors were possibly native to the fertile crescent in Syria and to ancient Egypt (among a handful of other places they’re believed to possibly have originated from, it’s hard to pin down), but even if only people in those places ever owned cats, if they let them outdoors all the time it would still be bad for the environment and cause issues. So instead of expecting something completely unreasonable, like the rest of the world no longer keeping cats as pets, let’s stuck with something reasonable, like not letting cats roam freely outdoors.
Keeping cats indoors isn’t any more cruel than keeping dogs indoors. You can leash train a cat, or let them out in a cat-proofed back yard, just like we can with dogs. Cat territory size is dependent on availability of resources, they don’t have an innate need to wander large distances as a species. Some individuals might have some wander lust sure, but that’s what leash training is for. Take them on hikes, you don’t have to put them outside unsupervised with the racoons and coyotes and cars and vulnerable bird species.
Outdoor cats have half the lifespan of indoor cats for a reason. The dead cats I regularly see on the side of the highway on my way home from work certainly aren’t happier than my neighbour’s cat is walking around on a leash alive and healthy. If you learn how to provide proper exercise and enrichment for your cat either indoors or under supervision/on a leash then you don’t need to let them outside unsupervised. If you want your cat to be both happy and safe, then there are plenty of options that are better for both your cat and the local ecosystem. This is something we naturally expect of dog owners, there’s no reason why we can’t do the same with cats.
Yeah, okay. So much less cruel to just trap and kill them all. Unless you’ve got a secret cat utopia where they can all go to.
The problem is there already. People adopting and keeping them indoors is not the problem.
A real solution would be better laws and enforcement involving cat breeders and people who let cats roam and reproduce freely. Or all the assholes around the time COVID lockdowns who figured they could just adopt temporarily and then abandon their pets.
Yeah, okay. So much less cruel to just trap and kill them all. Unless you’ve got a secret cat utopia where they can all go to.
Actually yeah that might be needed in some ecosystems. Having cats indoors doesn’t guarantee they won’t escape unfortunately. It should probably be illegal to buy and breed cats in many places around the world. Laws requiring they all be neutered would also help. I know Spain spays and kills feral cats regularly.
We need to find better, more sustainable, more local animals to replace them with.
Sure cats sometimes catch mice, but you know what else also catches mice and is actually native to wherever your area is? Owls.. Owls that are being chased off by said cat.
I think it depends on where you live. Where I live there’s not as many owls because everything is just grassland/prairie, so lots of farms still have farm cats for pest control, but I do think it’s ideal to go without if you can.
I mean, this became a pretty prominent template so I don't know how much you can really say it's not a meme, unless you don't regard words in general as capable of being memes.
I think it’s a meme, but the proliferation of this exact format is why they created c/microblogmemes. Otherwise meme communities become like 70% screenshots of text.
You are saying my 10 pound cat who avoids people while killing the voles that plague my yard should follow the same rules my 85 pound golden retriever with stranger danger anxiety does?
Funny you should say that because there’s a cat that’s attacking people (including a kid), dogs and cats in a neighborhood around where I live and authorities are saying “Can’t do anything about it, people are free to let their cat roam free and it’s registered so it’s not considered a stray 🤷”
That is pretty funny to think about. Dangerous, but amusing.
I know when my cat bites my partner for food or attention she just let’s him do it. Then she’ll freak out all flustered, I’m like ya your literally letting him do it. Throw him out of the bathroom ffs!
Or, or, or – instead of doing that fucking absurd thing you suggested to try to ignore the valid points other people are making, we deal with them the same way we deal with other ecologically disastrousinvasive species.
How bad it is depends on where you live, but yeah, for a lot of reasons most of the world probably shouldn’t have outdoor housecats. As the article you linked pointed out though, most of the damage is being done by feral cats, and well… that cat’s out of the bag, so to speak.
Feral cat populations are created and maintained by outdoor non-feral cats. Lots of people who don’t keep their cats indoors also don’t get their cats fixed either.
Created yes. Maintained not so much. Feral cats can make more feral cats on their own just fine. In fact, outdoor housecats are really bad for feral cats, because they hunt prey, fight for territory, and contribute to overpopulation of small predators without having to deal with the constant dangers that an actual feral cat does.
“So, we set coyotes loose to catch the cats. Then what? We get a wolf to eat the coyotes? Then we get a tiger to eat the wolf!? WHAT EATS THE TIGER, DAD - TELL ME THAT!”
I mean you are partially right. Bringing back wolves would help in NA. They are supposed to be a part of the ecosystem and might help keep coyotes in check to a degree at least and would certainly keep killer deer population is n check. They were eliminated more out of fear than legitimate threat and killer deer have now far exceeded human threat compared to wolves.
I don’t understand your point. I’m saying the effects of an inhospitable winter environment does quite a bit of the dirty work for keeping feral cat populations in check. Were you agreeing with me?
Are we really getting the indoor cat brigade on lemmy too? Yes, in the US outdoor cats are a danger to local wildlife. Stop pushing this on people who this does not apply to. Outdoor cats are fine in many other parts of the world. The USA isn’t the whole world.
Suggesting or thinking that this issue only applies to cats in USA / North America is uninformed at best.
Australia has ~650 million lizards killed each year by feral and outdoor cats, ~225/cat
As of 2013, Canada has 100-350 million birds killed by cats each year
As of 2021, China estimates based on public survey’s that “1.61–4.95 billion invertebrates, 1.61–3.58 billion fishes, 1.13–3.82 billion amphibians, 1.48–4.31 billion reptiles, 2.69–5.52 billion birds, and 3.61–9.80 billion mammals” there each year"
Cats and other vermin are absolutely destroying native populations in New Zealand as all of the birds there evolved with essentially no native predators.
South Africa, Cape Town alone estimates that 300k cats kill 27.5m critters each year
This is not unique to the states. Keep your cats inside.
Not to mention like in Europe multiple species of native small cats are being pushed out and outbred by feral and outdoor cats
Keep your moggies inside for their sake people! Also for, y’know, all the birds and small mammals killed by them and the fact that your pet can pick up some goddawful diseases from being outdoors and still have a shorter life expectancy than indoor ones
Honestly for me the risk of them getting severely injured in a cat fight or getting hit by a car is enough for them to be strictly “indoor cats” unless they are on a leash with a well fit harness.
Tbh I can’t believe we’re at a point where “keep your cats inside they live longer and don’t risk infection or injury or death” is straight up not enough to convince people to keep their pets which they love and cherish inside. Like I admit I’m biased - I’m a bird person and my main stake in this argument is the local wildlife. But at the same time…it’s kinda ridiculous that people would rather risk all that than bother to entertain and interact with and exercise their cats like you would with most other pets?
Yep, I can’t believe the hypocrisy either, pretty much all major cities require that dogs be on a leash or in a yard. Cats though? Can’t have them on a leash! Are you crazy!?! 😱
I agree cats shouldn’t be let out roam freely like that anywhere and anytime but it’s better cats than dogs. Cats in general are smaller and less aggressive to humans. Like how many large dogs you could find in 100 dogs and how many big cats you could find in same amount of cats?
Birds and people are not the same BUT ANIMAL LIVES STILL HAVE VALUE. The life of a bird IS NOT WORTH NOTHING, just because your life is worth more by some metric you can’t explain.
I think you should talk to someone about your raging solipsism. The experiences of animals are real and matter. Their suffering is identical in nature to your own. Or that of your cat, when they end up eviscerated.
Yeah, dogs tend to have larger territories than cats when allowed to free-roam, so cats have an easier time adapting a smaller space, hence why they tend to make better apartment pets. Feral cat colonies (which are caused and maintained by non-feral outdoor cats that haven’t been fixed) are also larger on average than feral dog packs when they form, amplifying their negative effects on the local ecosystem further. Free roaming cats also have a huge environmental impact, are a major threat to native wildlife, and are the most invasive species in the world. While free-roam dogs do hunt and do also have an impact on the environment, they don’t kill native animals on the same scale as cats. Cats will kill even if they’re not hungry and don’t intend to eat, and free roam cats eat more often in a day than free roam dogs do (up to ~12 times a day for cats, while dogs might eat once a day or even once every 2 to 3 days depending on food availability). Even more reason why we should keep both dogs AND cats inside.
If you want to give your cat more space to work with then leash training, catios, and cat-proof yards are great options! In my neighbourhood a lot of people tie their cats out on leads in their front yards as well. Everything we do for dogs to give them more space without letting them roam free we can do for cats as well, because even though they’re different animals, they’re both capable of being trained, supervised, or kept in some sort of enclosure.
Dogs kill 25,000 people annually. How many do housecats kill? It’s not a 1-to-1 comparison.
My cat throws herself through the doorway as soon as anyone gets home. She will chew through window screens. She breaks the catio whenever we put it up. If we don’t let her out, she will scream non-stop all night. She will fight with the other animals. She will resent us if we don’t let her out. When, not if, she does get out, she’ll stay away for longer if we haven’t been letting her out. She’ll disappear for days.
Meanwhile, if I let her out, she will usually sit on the patio or patrol the yard at night. She kills vermin such as voles, moles, and rats. She is territorial about our yard such that she has managed to push the colony of feral cats out of my yard. She gets regular checkups along with flea and tick treatment. She is 14 and happier than she’s ever been. I’m going to let her live her best life.
I don’t see what that has to do with anything. I’m not saying dogs should be allowed to roam free while cats are kept inside. I’m saying they BOTH shouldn’t be allowed to wander freely. Dogs being a danger to humans is just another reason why. I’m just listing some of the reasons why cats also shouldn’t be allowed to free roam. Danger to humans isn’t the only reason to keep an animal indoors or in an enclosure unless on a leash or supervised.
Dogs also become destructive when kept inside without being exercised or entertained. Dog owners are expected to provide those things instead of just letting their dogs roam loose around the neighbourhood to entertain themselves. Your cat isn’t some super special exception among cats who never kills any native animals that aren’t pests. You can cat-proof your yard to provide a safe outdoor space for her, or leash train her and take her on regular walks to drain her energy and satisfy her desire to roam, or make her an enclosure that she can stay in outside without being given complete unsupervised freedom, but of course those solutions would all take actual effort. So it’s up to you to decide, would you rather put in the effort to provide an appropriate environment for your pet, including enrichment and training and exercise, like dog owners are expected to do? Or would you rather shrug and toss your cat outside to contend with cars, coyotes, and all manner of toxic plants and chemicals and diseases and parasites, and allow her to continue to contribute to the destruction of the local ecosystem?
Because it’s not really about what makes your cat happy, that’s just the easiest excuse to convince yourself that you don’t have to change things. After all, if you did your due diligence she could be both happy and safe, and living her best life without having to be let outside unsupervised. What it’s really about is whether you’re willing to put in the work to make that happen as a responsible pet owner.
Dogs can’t because they present a danger to humans. That’s the clear difference.
I’m not just being difficult. My wife was a trainer at the human society for years. We know the stuff and have tried to do it. I value my cat more then wild birds and rodents, and my wife does taxidermy for whatever she brings back.
My cat broke her first harness, slipped out of her second, and now she flails whenever we try to come near her with a harness. We’ve tried walking, but she refuses to move. You don’t know my cat, and you don’t seem to realize that this won’t make her happy.
Local ecosystem destruction is a moot argument because we had multiple feral cats in our yard every night when we moved in, and now we have none. We have fewer cats total in our yard.
At the end of the day, she’s 14 and will start slowing down soon. If she dies, she lived a great life. My last outdoor cat was 20 years old. I get long living cats who are happy by just letting them be cats.
Add comment