Outside Cats - is it a sin?

did you know outdoor cats kill so many birds that there are no birds in britain?

No way are these two ever going to be allowed outside the house.
https://ptpimg.me/g4j77l.jpg

But they're the perfect indoor breed (Persian), and their 10-year-old, formerly feral sister, Clementine, would kill them if she weren't allowed to live outdoors pretty much 24-7. So, Clementine is allowed out. Fortunately, we live far enough back from any streets that I'm not worried about cars, and there aren't coyotes or raccoons in Hawaiʻi. She's so much happier out there, and watched after by the neighbors, too, who all love her. I just wish she could've been adjusted to tolerate other cats in the house. We certainly tried our best, but it was impossible.

One of my indoor cats is eager to go outside. Earlier this year he got out and I didn't notice for about 5 minutes. I go behind my house and he's back there in a showdown with a stray cat, and he's already been scraped and gouged by a thorny desert plant. There are many other strays, many other thorny plants, plus coyotes and mountain lions. He'd been dead within a week if I let him roam around.
I do have a harness and leash for him, but I put it on incorrectly the first time so now he's traumatized by it.

Deeming it "obscenely cruel" to keep cats indoors is just ridiculous

*sips milk, cracks knuckles*

if yr cat is happy to live indoors, that’s best for everyone

if yr cat yearns to go out and you live in a safe area (no predators no loose dogs no busy roads no malicious neighbors no battlecats) with an over abundance of common minifauna that you don’t mind unleashing hell upon, that’s aight, just make sure kitty is vaxxed up

if u meet the previous criteria except there’s cat snackers around then bring yr babies in before dusk & keep them in while it’s dark

if where you live isn’t ideal for free roaming then a couple reasonable compromises would be

i) a catio if you have the space/money

ii) a harness, a leash, and a protected outdoor area (fenced yard or isolated park where you can see other folx and critters coming from a ways off)

it’s a real bad idea to hook a leash to a cat’s collar, which hopefully is a breakaway collar to begin with since they can hang themselves otherwise. at some point any cat on a leash is gonna freak out and try to scarper & it’s better if all that force is distributed across its chest rather than focused on its throat.

like with any strange new thing, when you introduce a kitty to a harness you gotta go slow and build up pawsitive associations, and some cats just straight up won’t have it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

this is my smudgy puff

https://i.imgur.com/z7Ws2OY.jpg

this thread had me thinking about your excellent tips on the kitten thread.

A handsome specimen. Is the name Pele?

I think this conversation, raging 24/7 across the Internet as it is, usually turns into cross-purposes arguing between Americans who have witnessed the aftermath of traumatic coyote-maulings and slightly baffled non-Americans who live happily with tiddles in a quiet residential cul-de-sac in Surbiton or whatever

All the cats I had growing up were outdoors to some degree and couldn't have been convinced otherwise. With current incumbent Richie I'm a bit more minded to go with one of the above compromises because I live on a railway line and also he's kind of expensive looking

yeah if i found a Richie i’d surreptitiously slip him in my bag & saunter away whistling, sorry but that’s the way it is

yes that is my Pele! my bunny, my snoogle, my mushkin, ruler of my house and all she surveys 🙏

gracias visiting! i kind of can’t shut up abt kitties, had to stop myself from posting a dozen irrelevant follow ups 2 that post about earwax and boxes and dangling poop, etc.

I've got foxes in the neighborhood, I don't know if they fuck up cats or mutually leave each other alone but I wouldn't want to test it.

We once saw a fox by our front yard. Our cat was out and just watched it from a short distance. This particular fox didn't care about the cat.

I remember a few deadly cold nights mom would bring them in.

We moved into our current house a week or so before the infamous polar vortex of 2014. At one point the cat went out and didn't return for maybe seven days. We figured he was a goner, what with the temps hovering around -15 or whatever it was. But after about a week or so he showed up at the backdoor again, none the worse for the wear. We figured that because it was so cold all the animals called a detente and just huddled together in a pile of cats, dogs, raccoons, mice, possums, etc., until the worst of the weather waned. And then the smartest of the bunch said everyone had a count of 100 to get to where they needed to be before the hostilities resumed.

Our cat is around 14 or 15, a little chunky, blind in one eye and missing a fang. He still goes out but not far. This is him most of the time:

https://i.imgur.com/4jIdB4F.jpg

most unexpected thread ever.
had no idea this was even a thing.
i have always had cats, and they have all been both indoors and outdoors cats.
my current cat is getting older, 14, and so she spends more time indoors now.
but still, she needs to head out a couple of times a day.
that said, we are off a main road, and have a garden.
she never ever ventures far these days.
when she was a young'un we used to see her on the hunt in the fields behind us, but those days are well over.

A thing here in my US community is people getting super mad about cats in their yards, trapping them and taking them to impounds in other counties where their owners won't think to look for them. Also roaming cats being trapped and used as bait in dog fights. Unfortunately found out about this when one of our semi-feral rescues got out of the catio last summer and never returned. After months of searching for him and postering every utility pole within a mile, we can only hope he found a better home and didn't meet a terrible fate. But it's hard never knowing.

bloody hell.

oh, and what's a 'catio'?

xp fuck me, if they do that to cats I don’t like to think about what else they do

Catio is an enclosed outdoor space for cats - usually has an entrance directly from the house. Ours is on one end of our covered deck.

as soon as i posted i realised : catio = patio for cats.

never heard the phrase before, nor the chaos re owning a cat.

Yeah I think knowing the potential for cat abuse is a big driver for me to have indoor only cats. I rescued a kitten years ago from a ditch behind a grocery store where kids were shooting arrows into a litter. She was the only survivor.

Now *that* is obscenely cruel

oh, and to answer the thread : of course it's not a sin if a cat is an outdoor cat.
have you seen cats vs pigeons/crows/blackbirds
i.e. the predominant birds in most UK environments.
those fuckers totally scare the fuck out of cats.
personally i would love it if cats had the upperhand over pigeons as this plague island could do with a massive cull of the bastards.

A pigeon shat on me from the top of a floodlight post in the park a couple of months back. It went over my hair and down the front of my coat, the only luck I had is it missed my glasses and eyes. The bastard was looking very pleased with its work as well. It was all my indoor dog's fault for pulling me towards the post.

I think it was Elizabeth Kolbert who wrote about the link between humans bringing cats into regions and mass bird species extinctions. Maybe the birds have wised up about these furry killers a bit since the late prehistoric period!

I always thought that the problem was driven overwhelmingly by *feral* cats, not house cats.

90% of the time my boys are doing this
https://imgur.com/a/v03UgQE

Re: birds and cats. My experience has been if the bird finds my cat, they chase it and swoop it til kingdom come. And I feel bad for my cats and curse all flying creatures for their cruelty towards some of my closest friends. But then I will catch a moment where one of my cats finds a solitary bird that HASN’T noticed it. And it gets low to the ground and starts slowly slinking towards it ready to pounce. Typically they fail and the bird calls all its mates and they terrorise my cats again. The vicious circle. The birds in my area are pests that attack small children (seriously) so I don’t feel much sympathy for them when my cat is on the hunt. Between the three of them and their two years of life, they have caught two birds. I’m not crying myself to sleep about it

https://imgur.com/a/v03UgQE

xp not overwhelmingly no - nearly 1/3 is attributed to domestic indoor/outdoor cats, not including barn cats:

We estimate that cats in the contiguous United States annually kill between 1.3 and 4.0 billion birds (median 2.4 billion) (Fig. 1a), with 69% of this mortality caused by un-owned cats.

We defined owned cats to include owned cats in both rural and urban areas that spend at least some time indoors and are also granted outdoor access. We defined un-owned cats to include all un-owned cats that spend all of their time outdoors. The un-owned cat group includes semi-feral cats that are sometimes considered pets (for example, farm/barn cats and strays that are fed by humans but not granted access to habitations), cats in subsidized (including TNR) colonies, and cats that are completely feral (that is, completely independent and rarely interacting with humans). We did not classify cats by landscape type or whether they receive food from humans because the amount of time cats spend outdoors is a major determinant of predation rates and because predation is independent of whether cats are fed by humans

I've been on both sides of this and basically agree with H.P.: I feel like the domesticated cat was designed to live with humans while still having access to the great outdoors.

I grew up in a ruralish area with an indoor/outdoor cat, and then lived for many years as an adult with indoor-only cats. Now we have an indoor-outdoor cat — my wife already had him when we met, and he was already set in his ways. I didn't object, and honestly living again with an indoor-outdoor cat after living with indoor-only cats, you will have a hard time persuading me that indoor-only cats are just as happy. I'm not saying they can't be happy, but I really do not think they are as happy as cats allowed to go outside. My anecdotal experience of my own and my friends' indoor-only cats is that they are more neurotic and more prone to various kinds of weird behaviors because they have to find some way to get out all that cat energy.

But I do feel bad about the toll our guy takes on birds, I find at least a few dead birds in the yard a year (or he brings them inside), and I'm sure there are more that I don't see. (I don't mind him wreaking havoc on the local baby rabbit population, because our neighborhood is overrun with bunnies.) I don't know. It's a little hard for me to imagine having an indoor-only cat again, but it could happen in the right circumstances. I don't judge anyone else's choices or priorities, I don't think it's an open-shut case either way.

I don't own any cats, but I've housesat for them for years.

most of the owners lived in houses and were ok with them going outside in the enclosed backyard area.

I still never like this as sometimes they liked to go there and hide from me or not want to come back in, or they could get under the fence if not careful.

the worst though, was when my live-in landlord's cat, when I let him out one night as the landlord indicated I should. this cat was a frail, old beat-up cat, 17 years old, badly fucked up spine, all kinds of ailments, very slow and weak. so ten minutes pass and he shows up at the door and his face looks weird, and I'm like what's up with your face.

then I looked closer and realized it had a dead cat in its mouth that it had just mercilessly slaughtered in the backyard.

I have a bad thing with rats. I wouldn't let him in until he released the rat (onto the carpet). it was only the next morning when I had the fortitude to pick up the dead rat and dispose of him. almost threw up after. cat outright gutted the fucker.

Once watched my parents cat devour an entire rat: head, body, feet, bones. Absolutely nothing left of it. Ngl after the initial shock it was absolutely fascinating. I watched the whole thing. Worried what this says about me.

brb....puking

Our cat does this sort of amazing surgical thing with mice. He peels them apart very delicately and eats the bits he likes — including the brains — and then leaves these vivisected corpses with neat piles of tiny organs next to them. Real Hannibal Lecter stuff.

once I was talking to my brother in the kitchen and suddenly he started violently gagging and I said you alright there? + his quite amusing reply was "I think I've just stood on the remains of a mouse" (in his socks)

remarkable collection of nightmarish posts in this thread today.

Shame on the rat sympathisers. Keep posting the gory details people

Tbh, I wish my cats ate rats whole. Don’t fancy finding decomposing rat body’s in our garden or decapitated heads on our bedroom floor

my cats have never encountered a rat so the closest i've come to witnessing their inner nature is the occasional decapitated roach

then I looked closer and realized it had a dead cat in its mouth that it had just mercilessly slaughtered in the backyard.

Gotta say I did not immediately clock that this was a typo and was like 😯

OMG

we were given a cat by my older sister when she came home from the Ram Dass ashram in college, she was named Girlie Girlie, they told us she only ate brewer's yeast

she was an amazing cat. she growled at us to stay away when we finally fed her meat

I suspect windows take out many more birds than cats.

Once watched my parents cat devour an entire rat: head, body, feet, bones.

I think I read once that one reason cats are so good at reducing rodent-born illnesses is that they don't eat the absolute entire thing and leave behind the (literally) shitty bits, whereas a dog will happily go around hoovering up rat poop all the time and therefore potentially spread rat-borne disease. Hell, my friend's dog obsessively sniffs around the backyard eating rabbit poop. And every dog owner knows that cat poop is a favorite dog treat. (I love dogs, but they're gross; there's a reason there are not many stinky cats).

The most horrific historic cat story I read was re: the siege of Leningrad. As the city starved they systematically ate all the pets (and eventually the odd person or two). As the people died the bodies literally piled up, since there was no place to bury them (the ground was frozen), and as the bodies piled up the rats moved in, feasting on the corpses and spreading disease. When the blockade was breached they had to bring in hundreds of cats from Siberia by train to take care of the rats. Apparently there are statues in their honor:

https://st4.depositphotos.com/1670286/21923/i/1600/depositphotos_219233568-stock-photo-russia-tyumen-july-2018-sculpture.jpg

Yeah, my parents cat did leave this little red part of the rat, looked like a stomach or spleen or something idk rat anatomy. I figured it was the nasty party of the rat. Was impressed he could eat around the whole thing except for this one little circle of red goo

Every city should have golden cat statues imo, haven’t they given us enough?

Every city should have golden cat statues imo, haven’t they given us enough?

I've been exposed to every side of this, and Have Thoughts.

When I was a child we had a few indoor/outdoor cats. Nowadays I keep cats inside. In my mind it's less about the cat's own safety than about the safety of local wildlife, and for my own peace of mind.

Also our current cat is not a candidate for hybrid life - he got out once by accident and it was traumatic for all concerned, so he's an inside cat for good or for ill.

In my youth I worked for an animal protection organization, and as a result I studied every angle and wrote on this topic frequently.

I also did some volunteer work with feral cats - fostering, taming, helping with trap/neuter/release programs. There is a lesser-of-evils logic to TNR. These cats will never be pets. They deserve to live, but it's best for them to be fixed. Kittens born feral can be successfully tamed. Some other alley cats can transition to barn life in rural settings.

Outdoor cats eating birds is a nontrivial issue. Waving it away as "nature gonna nature" oversimplifies. There are various views out there, but I am frankly too tired to debate the ethics.

So I will just send good wishes to all the people and beasts out there, hope you all have a good napping place and a regular source of food.

Outdoor cats eating birds is a nontrivial issue. Waving it away as "nature gonna nature" oversimplifies.

If it were not for the close relationship between domestic cats and people, the number of descendants of the original feline species who later became domesticated cats would be extremely small and they would all live in a very small area in north africa. we are directly responsible for the vast population of cats on earth. the millions of small birds they kill every year is a direct result of our actions or inactions.

But isn't that also saying that cats made a strategic alliance? Cats absolutely benefit from the cat-human relationship, they hitched themselves to a good ride. And they've been work animals for most of that time, they still are a lot of places. Plus of course they're fascinating weird lovable roommates. I'm not going to argue against the human-cat relationship. But I agree that its worst effects should be mitigated.

kinda hoping some intrepid ILXOR will turn this thread title into a song

If it were not for the close relationship between domestic cats and people, the number of descendants of the original feline species who later became domesticated cats would be extremely small and they would all live in a very small area in north africa. we are directly responsible for the vast population of cats on earth. the millions of small birds they kill every year is a direct result of our actions or inactions.

Aimless OTM. There was a sentiment expressed upthread like if a bird (who can fly) can't get away from a cat (who can't fly), then maybe that bird wasn't meant to live. That's the oversimplification I was referring to. Like, okay, but if humans have their thumb on the evolutionary scale then it's not really a fair Darwininian shakeout.

It's morally fraught, but I strongly doubt anyone whose mind is already made up is going to change their mind because of what we type here.

cos everytime I tried to tell you
the words just came out wrong
I hope an ilxor says outside cats are a sin
in a song

I'm not a cat owner and probably never will be, but the happiest, friendliest cat I've known was an indoor-outdoor cat. His name was Diabolo and he belonged to my housemates at the little house I lived at in slightly-rural Normandy. The first time I saw the place it was at dusk and there was mist over the fields, and then this white cat came walking out of the mist, and I thought, "yes, I want to live here." There were cows in the field, and sometimes he would slip under the fence and go hang out with the cows, who seemed to tolerate it just fine. But he loved people and when you got home he would come running to meet you just like a dog and jump up to your hand to be petted. Of course as an indoor-outdoor cat he didn't live long; he was hit by a car a couple of years after that. I have no idea how the ethics and wisdom of keeping him inside vs. outside adds up, but I'm glad I got to know him; he was a great cat.

re: impact of kits on the flappy folk ima just drop this here w/o comment

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

again, not gonna comment but if i were to comment it’d prob be something along the lines of pots and kettles except like the pot has caused and is causing myriad — genocides? is that too loaded a term? well i spose we’re actually genociding ourselves/each other anyway so let’s just go with extinctions. and the kettle is one tiny weapon in the pot’s vast armory. and the pot is all “smdh @ u, kettle, with ur bloodthirsty destructive ways, tsk tsk, tut tut” while lounging on an ever-growing mountain of bones.