Keeping cats indoors is a rare solution where everybody wins
Keeping cats indoors is a rare solution where everybody wins
In the debate over protecting native wildlife from domestic felines, one thing is often overlooked: cats should be kept indoors for the sake of cats
I am not here to make the case that cats should be kept indoors for the sake of local wildlife – that case has been made over and over and over and over again. Cat owners know these arguments, and if they have not been persuaded by the fact that cats kill more than 6 million native animals in Australia a day they will not be persuaded by me.
There is a fairly tedious assumption that if you love wildlife you must hate cats, and visa versa. And nothing will turn cat people off faster than encountering a person who hates cats.
I understand this. I also hate people who hate cats. So let’s set the birds and the bettongs to one side for the moment, and consider the other, obvious fact: cats should be kept indoors for the sake of cats.
Cat owner and avid environmentalist here: totally agree. I’ve always kept my cats inside for the obvious environmental reasons, but ask any vet and they’ll tell you that indoor cats lead much longer, healthier lives.
We need to start treating dogs and cats the same way - if there’s a cat around without it’s owner and it’s not leashed, it goes to the pound. $250 fee to retrieve your cat to pay for boarding and also donate to the pound that receives them. If people had to pay $250 and drive all the way to the pound to pick up their cat every time they let them out, I can tell you that outdoor cat owners will go one of two ways: they’ll either stop owning cats (big win) or they’ll keep them inside (also big win).
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completely agree with all of this
How do you deal with a cat that's used to roaming?
We have one indoor only cat but the other one was a feral kitten we found and we have never been able to contain them without them going nuts, which makes the indoor cat miserable too.
Time, in my experience.
I've rehabilitated several feral cats, each older than 2 years. It just takes a few weeks to adjust.
That’s a hard one because I’ve never experienced it before myself. I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘going nuts’. My assumption is that the longer you keep them inside, the more they adapt to the lifestyle and the easier it will become. You could also build a cat run / outdoor enclosure for them, or leash and harness train them to go on walks. I’ve had good experiences with using feliway to help calm cats too - that may help. If the issue is that the kitten is territorial, then it might help to set up a private area for them and ensure that they have their own separate litter box that other cats can’t use.
Indoor cats live longer, healthier lives. And they can even be harness-trained to be able to enjoy going outside on walkies!
Our two cats get supervised time in the backyard every couple of days - we used to put them in harnesses until we moved to a place with high enough fences that they couldn't get out even if they wanted to.
Mostly they just wanna chew grass for 15 minutes and maybe investigate a random plant bed, and they quickly learned that if they come back inside when called they get treats :)
Cats are one of the most adaptive species on this planet. All of their needs can be met inside. Inside cats in Australia have a better quality of life than a lot of humans do around the world.
When I adopted my cats the shelter and foster people asked if the cats will stay inside or go outside and when I said inside they all made a sigh of releave and the shelter workers said "thank god, thats definitely the best for them". I build them a small cage that I put up at the window in my old flat, now I have a balcony where they can roam and when I live in a house with a garden at some point they will get a big catio.
I think that them being able to safely go outside a little bit is important, the outside world gives them so much different experiences. Wind, fresh air, outside noices, smells from neighbors barbecuing. But yeah, leaving them completely outside is not good
Yes, I think a balance is best. There is absolutely no reason why a cat can't experience the outdoors during daylight under supervision of their owner. They should also be freely allowed to go outside at night, as long as they are limited to a cage type structure connected to the house.
Anyone keeping them permanently locked inside without any plan to change that really has no business owning one in the first place. The "b-b-but they live longer!!!!" argument people use to justify this is also disingenuous. People pretend it's some blanket truth, when in reality it depends entirely on what the cat is doing outdoors.
I'll just harness my cat up, and take them for a brief morning drag....
I get what you're saying, but you're just wrong. In my unscientific and anecdotal-driven opinion, there are too many cats outside as-is. They upset ecosystems. If you don't have the space for a cat to wander inside, you shouldn't be adopting a cat.
Live in NZ. My kitten is, and will always be an indoors cat. When i finally get to a larger house she'll have a lovely catio.
This is the best option. My parents built a catio that ran from a cat door along their actual patio then went tall and up to a covered window so the cats could go in and out through either entryway.
Surprised a similar law mandating cats stay inside hasn’t been implemented in NZ. Considering all of the work y’all are doing with the Predator Free 2050 project.
I’m surprised by this.
Considering that NZ is the country where one individual is responsible for an entire extinction, and modern NZ is one of the most progressive countries in the world.
CSIRO should either (a) generically engineer a cat that doesn’t function as an ambush predator (making them congenitally short-sighted could help, though iridescent fur that prey see from a mile away would also make them more appealing as pets), or (b) work on creating domesticable variants of sufficiently catlike native marsupials to replace cats as pets
👀 phew! thank god it’s another article throwing stones at other species on the planet fucking up the wildlife.
#innocent4lyfe
Cats are innocent in so far as it's not their fault that they are super efficient carnivorous hunters. No native bird or mammal found in suburbia stands a chance against a cat.
It's their human owners who let them roam who are at fault for the devastation they cause on native wildlife.
Cats messing up the wildlife is at the fault of humans. These articles aren't telling you we need to get rid of or punish cats, it's telling humans they need to treat their cats with better understanding. Talking about how cats mess up wildlife isn't blaming cats, it's blaming humans for putting them there and letting them fuck up wildlife, especially when all signs point to everyone being happier and healthier if they are kept indoors.
I hazard a guess that Ringmaster knows this and they made their comment with tongue firmly in cheek.
Cat owner here too. One of my cats is a pure-breed Maine Coon, the other is a domestic mid/long hair. They have never ever been outdoors cats (well, the latter was a stray so I guess she was?) but they're indoors kitties now. No issues at all, they have no interest to go outside. They are happy and content. I support indoors-only cats, and this is from someone who lives in a shoebox apartment.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Most days, when the sun hits that part of the floorboards, our cat Laurie can be found there, lazing in a sunbeam watching the birds through the glass.
The Invasive Species Council responded by calling on the New South Wales government to introduce laws requiring that cats be kept indoors.
She escaped a few times when she was younger, usually making it no more than one body length from the door before freezing in terror at the overwhelming vastness of the outdoors.
Once, when we were visiting my parents’ farm, I clipped her into a harness with the expectation that she would enjoy exploring the yard, but she flattened her robust body to the ground and refused to move.
There was a moment, in our first winter in this house, when we woke to the sound of rats chewing the ceiling, then I wished my old cat Elmo was still alive.
If Nugget hadn’t lost the leg and decided to stick closer to home, I doubt she would have lived past five.
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