Indoor vs Outdoor Cats: Pet behavior and owner responsibility

So in the post your pet thread, there were a number of anecdotes of cats bringing in dead animals and the like, and I made the following assertion:

To rephrase with the benefit of hindsight: I assume that cat owners who let their cats roam freely are accepting the good chance that it will kill other animals (possibly vermin, possibly birds, possibly bird-vermin) and that there is a higher chance of the cat being killed or otherwise harmed by everything that's out there in urban or rural areas.
The following counterpoints were made:

This I addressed in thread as linked (also including a link to WWF advice on how to provide a safe outlet for the hunting/stalking instinct), but it does mark the introduction of "not as many are killed as by feral cats" into the argument. Again, my point is not that owned cats running free are the key factor in birds/wildlife dying, but that if you let them do so, you are accepting the possibility that they will kill things and/or be killed/harmed themselves as a routine chance you take on a daily basis. This becomes far more certain when you have a known killer on your hands.
Some cat owners then shared their own explanations for why they choose to control their cats and keep them indoors. Alligator, Ingmar shared their reasons and the latter shared an encounter with a cat owner who regarded it as cruelty to keep cats indoors. To which @Llhowon asserted the following:

It is indeed impossible to say what is true for all cats in all ownership situations. It is entirely reasonable to think about your cat's desires the same way that dog owners adapt to the exercise/play needs of their pets by modifying their daily routines accordingly. However, I just want to underline that the triggering argument that cats are likely to engage in killing (especially if you've already seen them kill) or be harmed/killed themselves is not at issue in this statement. The question of how you modify your pet's behavior in accordance with your ethical sense, concern for the environment, and concern for their well-being is a tricky one, but ultimately it is on the pet owner when they decide the answer to that is free roaming cats. That's really all I want to be clear about: that it's not an accident or a quirk when killing or dying happens.

From there, we have a number of interesting directions: Alligator with her belief that cats can be raised to be indoor, Lhowon with more cat psychology, Sjofn with turning outdoor into indoor, Adam B with the adaptation process of Oboe. That's where it gets interesting, as MrsWidget details her struggle with the ethics of cat ownership, and NyimaR states:

Which is, in fact, the position I presume cat owners have when they make that choice. Finally, Meserach states the following with reference to scientifically grounded arguments:

I would just say it's worth clicking on the link which does agree that cats kill a lot of things, has no stance on the risk to the cats themselves for obvious reasons, and is making a different sort of argument designed to refute alarmism about the degree to which cats harm the environment in Britain (it does seem like other places with other situations could still be a lot more vulnerable) relative to habitat destruction or pollution. That is "don't wage war on domestic cats if you care about birds", which I think is pretty reasonable.

So, that's where it stands, and I think it's good to have a place where we can argue opinions and data on ethical/environmental/etc decisions about pet ownership or continue the existing conversation without angsting up the nice thread further.

I knew someone who had an outdoor cat. One day it disappeared and said person was very, very upset. Then a week later it came home and said person was very, very happy! Then a year later it disappeared again and never came back. While I felt bad for said person, I found myself wondering what exactly this individual thought was going to happen after that first time. They live in an area with questionable traffic control and a real coyote problem. Of course the cat was eventually never going to come home.

My cats are indoor cats. I have zero scientific evidence to suggest that they are happier this way, but they are well-fed, entertained and while I'm sure they wish they had more room to explore and stake out their own territory, they seem happy.

The songbird killer thing doesn't concern me in the slightest when I think about people releasing their cats. Wild animals die to predators, that's nature for you. You can have concerns about specific populations and specific habitats but it seems plainly evident that songbird populations, in general, can survive and thrive despite predation by house cats.

The danger to cats from cars, dogs, other cats, assorted wildlife, etc, or the fact that outdoor cats will piss off your neighbours to no end when they use their gardens as cat toilets would be a much bigger factor in deciding whether or not to keep a cat indoors. IMO.

Cats should stay indoors because Toxoplasmosis. If people want another reason, they don't know much about Toxoplasmosis.

Your "actively celebrate" line in the thread was at best an exaggeration and at worst something of a threadcrap, but I think you know that LK.

The reality is that outdoor cats will kill small animals and yes, the cat owners are morally culpable for those deaths, but "active celebration" is not a stance I think anyone is actually taking. More likely people are some combination of indifferent and resigned, combined with not really seeing the deaths of individual small animals in and of themselves as particularly morally salient events (distasteful though dealing with the remains may be).

It's not clear how much of a cruelty keeping cats indoors is or isn't; this steps into questions of cat psychology which I think are more or less impossible to answer, although I'd be interested in studies of some sort of proxy, like serotonin levels. It's also not clear how far we should stack the well-being of cats ethically against the individual deaths of the small wild animals - this gets into some philosophically deep waters as to the relative status of different kinds of animals as moral patients, and most assessments of that are going to be hopelessly hamstrung by anthropomorphism.

Zooming out to a more macro-scale, I think it's widely agreed that we do have a moral duty to protect biodiversity and not allow species in aggregate to become endangered by our actions in aggregate. However thinking on this macro scale is where the scientific question of whether domestic cat predation is actually endangering particular wild species becomes relevant; my link suggests that in Britain it has not been shown general problem, at least so far as native bird species are concerned (with the possible exception of specific areas which are habitats of rare species).

This is definitely my concern. At our place in Cali, there were at least two other cats (non-feral at least) who would come around the property regularly. Between them, the coyotes, and the chickenhawks (or whatever large predatory birds were stealing the chickens), I couldn't imagine letting them out unsupervised.

My mom used to have an outdoor cat though. She would bring home moles, mostly, and that didn't really bother us. I would've been really upset if she didn't come home every night though. Mom insisted that she needed to go outside because she was born a barn cat (we got her at 6 mos old or something?) but her current owner keeps her indoor only and she seems happy enough.

At the very least, though, IMO, if you're going to insist on having an outdoor or indoor-outdoor cat, you better spay/neuter. (Not that you shouldn't do that anyway if you're not deliberately breeding).

I'm curious about this. The most significant risk factor for a human contracting toxoplasmosis seems to be through handling of feline fecal matter; as such, if you have an outdoor cat that defecates outdoors, aren't you actually less likely to contract toxoplasmosis, compared to an indoor cat owner that's regularly clearing out a litter tray?

Only if they have it already. How is a cat going to get it to pass to you if they never come in contact with other animals/food that has it?

I agree that someone who has an outdoor cat and pretends that they aren't probably killing things all day is kidding themselves. Cats are experts at killing things, of course they're going to kill things. What I'm not sure about is why we should care if species are not actually under threat as a result, and I agree with Meserach that "morally culpable" is an odd phrase to even employ when talking about the death of a vole. That doesn't really enter into the decision-making process for me as far as what to do with my cats is concerned.

I keep my cats inside because I want to keep having cats, and that's all there is to it. Of all the bad things that could happen as a result of letting my cats roam the great outdoors, really the only ones that concern me are the ones that could happen to the cats themselves.

Cats are shockingly good at killing birds (or more likely, songbirds are goddamned stupid), the fattest laziest cats I owned as a kid all managed to kill a whole mess of birds.

I own only female cats due to outdoor male cats in my history having a track record of roaming and getting hit by cars in the process (and getting calls from neighbors who left their doors open only to find my cat sleeping on their bed), and my current cats have been indoor due to apartment living more than anything else. Being upset that outdoor cats kill critters is basically ignoring what cats are, and that almost all of their play behaviors are practicing how to kill critters.

THIS IS THE CUTEST THING EVER

Pet cats aren't wild animals, though. Their killing things isn't really "nature." They're a non-native predator killing things. Not saying people should weep over the songbirds and rodents and rabbits and who knows what else pet cats kill, but just handwaving it as "nature" isn't really ... accurate.

First cat was an outdoor cat (I was a kid and had little choice in the matter). He was a brute. 25lbs of kickass, claw-whirling pain, but he loved his family. He'd kick the shit out of dogs (he punked the shit out of my dad's dog when he came around after my parents got divorced). He killed mice and birds and rabbits. He once cornered a possum and probably would have tangled with it if we didn't shoo the possum away and drag the cat in. He'd roam the neighborhood and bring female cats around to scrump outside my bedroom window like "Hey man, see? I not only kill birds to bring to you, but I'm hot shit, too!". The only time I felt guilty was when he got into a nest of baby rabbits. That sucked. One died before we got the rest to a vet. I honestly didn't and don't have a problem with house cats hunting the local wildlife. Once I grew older, though, I realized he was in a lot of danger in terms of getting run over or some jackass who doesn't like cats doing something to him. (That cat had STORIES by the way, he was the most human pet I've ever had and none of my other pets will live up to expectations.) Now my two cats are indoor cats. I'll bring them out during the warm months and supervise their outside time for 10-15 minutes and let them eat grass and roll around. No more free-roaming, though.

I have an indoor cat. She is normally pretty well-behaved and chill. Problem is that she has a nemesis. There is a big orange cat in our neighbourhood. Once or twice a week, in the middle of the night, orange cat comes by my (ground-floor) apartment. My cat and orange cat howl at each other through the window at full blast, then try and kill each other through the glass. They have yet to succeed, but my sleep has been seriously disrupted and it has a real impact on me. I'm not sure what to do about it, because there's not much I can do about my cat and I don't know who owns the other cat. I've tried to catch it a few times (imagine me, 2AM, housecoat and rubber boots, chasing a cat through my yard) and but no success.

So outdoor cat owners, consider that you don't know where your cat is, what it is doing, or whether other people welcome it on their property. Letting you cat wander free can be a pretty serious nuisance. A dog can be trained to stay where it's wanted, but a cat cannot.

Pet cats are predators. When put in a situation where there is prey available they will, as likely as not, follow their instincts to hunt and kill. That's nature. And as for them not being native I would argue that it's a moot point. We introduced them, we're not going to get rid of them, and our habitats are by extension their habitats. Any wild creatures who want to make use of human habitats have at this point adapted to the presence of cats as a natural hazard.

Which is not to say that I would approve of people introducing cats to habitats that are cat-free, but in most of the world the damage was done hundreds or thousands of years ago and all the prey species have already adapted or died off.

They pretty much are. What we call housecats are a subspecies of wildcat, and they've changed very little in the domestication process. That's why they so easily slot into that small predator role when introduced into a wild ecosystem.

This depends on where you live. If you live someplace that has indigenous wildcats, setting housecats loose will barely make a difference in the local ecosystem, about the same as if the wildcats had an unusually high number of births. If you live someplace where introduced feral cats are, the ecosystem as it once existed is already fucked and your housecat won't fuck it any more than it already is. But if there are no cats around, then yeah letting some loose wouldn't really be part of "nature" as it applies to that area, and they could do some damage, although probably more likely to other small predators that they outcompete by basically being overleveled for the zone.

Tell that to the suddenly well-fed wildcat!

We had this exact thing at my apartment with our last cat. What was funny was that the visitor would often just be lounging on the roof of our building but since it was visible through the window Wesley would be inside losing his shit.

When I was 23, I had an apartment with no air conditioning (ugh) so I left the sliding glass door to the patio slightly open to let air circulate whenever I was home. I was watching TV one day when all of a sudden this big gray cat poked its head through the vertical blinds, looked up at me, and meowed. Kinda like "oh, hai! What's going on in here?". I let him come inside and nose around and then he finally settled next to me on the couch like we were watching TV together. I opened a can of tuna up for him, he gobbled it down, slept for a while, and then just got up and left. He kept coming back like that every day (and one time I had left the window open while I was at work and he somehow managed to climb in, fall asleep on my bed, and scare the living crap out of me when I walked into my bedroom).

He was definitely a killer. Occasionally I'd find a dead bird or mouse outside my patio door, sometimes intact, but usually just the head or upper body. One day he came inside while my girlfriend was there and I could see he clearly had something in his mouth. He jumped up on my the arm of the couch, opened his mouth, and out flew a live bird. It scared my girlfriend so badly that she actually ran screaming out of the apartment - she had a fear of birds - and it took me nearly an hour to get it to fly out. Well, eventually he just decided that he was going to stay. He stopped going outside even when I had the door open. I guess outdoor life just wasn't working for him anymore or something? Anyway, I was perfectly fine with that so he just became my cat. I got him neutered, all his shots, and he lived with me until the day he died.

tl;dr - It's definitely possible for an outdoor cat to be domesticated as indoor, and yes, I was always afraid of him getting hit by a car or something when he was outside. Luckily it worked out that both me and the cat wanted the same thing.

Also, R.I.P. Kitty-Boy (yes, I was very creative with his name)

That cat knew your girlfriend wasn't going to be fond of the bird. He was sending a message about whose adopted house this was.

You realize, MatthewF, that you probably stole someone else's pet in this process.

I always thought that was a possibility, but he was pretty malnourished when I first saw him, and when he stopped leaving the apartment, I just let him stay. As far as I'm concerned, he made his decision.

I think that a lot of people with indoor/outdoor cats (i.e. cats that are allowed outdoors) believe that cats, being predators, will do what comes naturally, i.e. hunt prey (songbirds, other small animals), which routinely die at the teeth of predators. In other words, it's natural for cats to kill, and it's natural for those animals to be killed, so there's no real issue. Unfortunately, cats are introduced predators--at least in N. America. This means that they present an additional stress on wildlife that already faces dwindling habitat, pollution, etc. Environmental concerns play a large part in why our cats are indoors-only. If wildlife wishes to enter our home and entertain our two cats, then that's one thing.

The other main reason for keeping our cats indoors is because of their safety. We live in a suburban area, but yes, there are coyotes here. My sister, who takes care of some feral cats in Ohio, found one of the cats dead--a hole eaten into its stomach and intestines spilling out into the snow. Another of the outdoor cats--a sweet cat who'd been abandoned by an owner--died after its jaw was completely crushed and ravaged (flesh hanging off it). The cat returned to the house, and my sister was able to have it euthanized. That's a lot of heartbreak, and my sister can't take any more indoor cats into the house. I don't want my cats to find rats, a coyote, or any other animal that might kill or injure it.

Disease is a third consideration, but it follows behind the other two.

The only thing I'd ask of people who do allow their cats to go outdoors is to ensure that the cats are spayed/neutered. One of the really big factors driving the environmental concerns with cats is an increase in feral cats. Given that female cats become sexually mature around 5 months of age, and given that cats go into heat about every 3 weeks, one unspayed female can have quite a few litters! Male cats that haven't been neutered can father even more litters! Locally, we have low-cost spay/neuter clinics that make it easy even for people on extremely limited incomes to spay/neuter their pets. More municipalities should investigate these kinds of clinics.

Generally feral cats don't just hang out with people. You might have provided a better environment than the previous owner. Also how did you know he was malnourished? My cats whine like they haven't eaten in days about an hour before feeding time, twice a day, every day.

When I was growing up, our cats were indoor/outdoor cats, but we also lived in a rural area where there was low danger of traffic running them over. Still, we lost 2 to a pitbull attack, and almost lost one to getting stuck in a fence.

All my cats as an adult have been indoors only.

I skimmed most of the replies before posting, so I don't know if anyone mentioned coyotes, but a lot of people lose cats to coyotes nowadays.

I honestly think though that birds are in more danger from environmental damage and habitat destruction than from cats.

I grew up with cats and my family generally let ours outside. There's no question in my mind that letting cats outdoors increases the risks to their health, via disease by exposure to other animals, injury through violence or accident, or all of the above. I kept my own cat Loki inside, in part because letting him out wasn't practical in an apartment, but also because it was just plain safer for him. It may even be cheaper since you don't need as many vet visits and vaccinations. That said, keeping your cat indoors can carry additional health risks like obesity and its accompanying problems, especially if you don't provide exercise and activity and don't monitor their diet. I don't think keeping a cat indoors is in any way cruel, though.

Yes, your cats will kill several species of small furry creatures when you let them roam freely outdoors. That's their nature, they're predators. Most cats think they're tigers prowling the jungle once they step off your back patio and enter The Wild. Is that a moral or ethnical concern for you as a cat's chief staff-member? I haven't had to think that through as an adult.

Oh, I know feral cats typically avoid people like the plague. As far as malnourishment, he looked nothing like he did in that picture. He was almost all skin and bones. Gradually, over about a month's time, when I'd give him a can of wet food every day, he started to look much healthier. Honestly, if I had to guess, I think he was an abandoned pet. I'm not really sure what else I could have done in that situation. I mean, what would you suggest I should have done?

Of course we do (us being me and my wife). We'd prefer he didn't get worms (because they're icky and the treatment cost money) from eating wildlife and we don't like it, when he's been in a fight and gotten hurt.
But I agree with Nyimar et al and for me the choice here would be outdoor cat or no cat.

But I also don't read or post in pet threads because I find that most people go way to overboard with their pets. I like and enjoy my cat, but if he got killed it would be nature, not a tragedy, and should he get cancer or some other expensive to treat disease, it would be goodbye cat (in a humanely and quick way).

From what you've said I think you did the right things. Leafleting in your local area to say "I've found a cat (picture) does it belong to you?" is probably a good idea in such circumstances, but as malnourished as this guy was either the owner didn't care to get him back or didn't deserve to get him back.

Our cats go in and out as they please barring some occasional circumstances like when we're gone over winter vacation or headed to the vet.

For me, arguments about whether being locked indoors is healthier for them or safer for birds or whatever are entirely beside the point, kind of like saying people shouldn't ski because they could get hurt. Yeah, you could get hurt skiing -- and yet people still do. And birds? I eat far more meat than they do despite being nearly vegetarian, so that's not a soap box I'll get up on.

Such freedom is a large part of why I like cats over dogs, as cats aren't stupid or aggressive so you can give them agency over their lives. I prefer my pets not kept in cages or on leashes. I give them food and shelter and affection if they wish to stay, and freedom should they wish to leave.

People who ski make a conscious choice to do so. Cats who get hit by cars are getting randomly killed by something they can't remotely begin to understand.

I don't consider my house a cage. Hell, if I had my druthers the amount of time I spent at home would be a lot closer to what my cats do than what I do now.

I have three cats: two from a shelter, and one that I think was an abandoned pet, judging by how it wore an old flea collar but became emaciated and blind in one eye over the eight months it was sporadically visiting my house before I was able to catch it. All are neutered/spayed. I also live in a medium-sized city (~100,000 people) and have a moderate-sized backyard that is mostly fenced (courtesy of my neighbors all having fenced yards), though there is a gap in one corner where the neighbor's fences don't converge.

So, thanks to my mostly fenced yard, I feel fairly comfortable letting my cats outside with occasional supervision, and I feel this limited exposure is a good compromise between keeping them indoors and letting them wander freely. I started them out with leashes for the first year, and then gradually became more relaxed as they showed little inclination to wander or jump the fence. They'll occasionally head for the fence gap, but I spray 'em with water if I catch them doing it, so it's not something they'll try when my wife or I are with them. If we aren't with them and they DO make it out of the yard, they're rarely gone for more than 20 minutes, and usually just want to sniff the neighbors' gardens.

During the seven years we've had this routine of letting them out every day, they've only caught a few live animals that I'm aware of (baby rabbits, a mouse, and a chipmunk), and only killed one: an adult robin, which died after thrashing around on the ground for an hour or two. They also occasionally catch mice in the garage, in the summer, so maybe that satiates some of their need for entertainment.

Edit - I did have two outdoor cats when I was growing up. They were two abandoned kittens that came to our house, and stuck around after my mom gave them milk. My dad hated cats and wouldn't let us officially keep them, though, so they were generally outdoors cats, with the exception that they could sleep in the garage if they wanted to. One had to be taken to the shelter to be put down when it was three years old, due to all the fights it'd been in. The other died from leukemia when it was eight or so. They lived happy lives, for the most part, but they were too short. I think my current cats are just as happy, now that they're spayed/neutered and don't feel all the urges that would otherwise leave them unfulfilled.

If you don't let the cat out if it wants to go out it's a cage, regardless of how you gild it. Pretty much by definition.

And cats who cross the street and wander make a conscious decision to do so. Nor have I ever met a cat who didn't understand cars are risky.

Anyway, you feel the need to protect your pet form the world, that's fine. I don't, and wouldn't be interested in them as pets if I did. Plenty of room for people to have differing beliefs here.

You disagree with my tone or choice of words, that's fine. But don't fucking tell me what you think I know. What I know is that it bothers me when people write about their cats killing things as if it were an anomaly or something the cat did, and I don't regard it as a cute pet trick. The mistake I made was further extending the derail that represents to me in the thread rather than simply starting a new thread at that point, but I reacted with emotion rather than a pedagogical or discussion-oriented approach. That's why I restated it in this thread.

Obviously. I was making a point in direct contrast with the passive voice framing of the question up to that point. Either take ownership of it in nuanced ways or start writing up your pets' Kill/Death ratio with treats for streaks, I don't care. But it's not something for which the cat is responsible nor is it inevitable; while it certainly doesn't apply to Nyimar who accepts that aspect directly, my experience with many cat owners has been that they just block it out or tie bells to the collar as if jingling death is a kinder fate for either the undoubtedly annoyed cat or the weaker prey it probably seeks out instead.

That's a place where most people, barring extreme cases, need to draw their own lines. It's neither efficient or desirable to presume that the law can address this or even that there needs to be a sweeping ethical taboo on a social level; when these lines are drawn, such as around dog fighting, it's quite likely to be for all the wrong reasons in terms of sociocultural pressures rather than genuine empathy or scientifically sourced concern for the animals' well being. My concern is simply that people be self-aware when they make these choices, and beyond that it's just one of many small ethical choices people make that is neither irrelevant nor pivotal in assessing what kind of person they are.

It suggests that, yes. However, it is speaking in broad terms around a single metric (total populations of birds) and in comparison to other variables such as habitat destruction and pollution. The idea there is not to blow cats out of proportion. If you look at the studies cited by my first link, you'll notice that a variety of different measures are used to measure the effect of cats on an area, whether it's in terms of habitat denial vs raw population decrease or the hyperexpansion of vermin that are better adapted to coping with cats or would ordinarily be checked by more vulnerable species. So I think like with most non-native species questions the answers are going to be mixed and conflicting apart from unusual cases such as places with isolated ecosystems.
But "it's hard to measure and sometimes irrelevant in terms of the key variables in ecosystem damage" is not the same as "a good idea", as you know. It ought to rule out the sort of pseudo-Darwinism that Kalle is advocating as a de facto assumption that because cats have been around for a while in a place that means everything's copasetic in terms of environmental impact. In terms of the decisionmaking criteria currently on the table, it seems like the argument looks like this:
Indoor only is bad because:
Cruel to the cat/against its nature
Inconvenient for some approaches to cat ownership

Outdoor is bad because:
Killing things
Disease/parasites
Death of cat
Potential for nuisance

To me, that's pretty clearly in one direction, and obviously that's going to add up differently for different people. I think you make a "cruel to the cat/against its nature" decision when you spay/neuter, for instance, but I don't even regard that as something responsible people opt out of in an age where we kill droves of cats/dogs in shelters. Obviously there are exceptions for unusual situations, but not many. I think you make a cruel to the cat/dog decision when you buy a pet versus adopting one in terms of the type of infrastructure you are supporting directly, but obviously it's a question of degree. There are all kind of behavior modification practices for pets that would be cruel if practiced on humans; I try to use the most humane options, but ultimately I also make my job easier by having small, harmless dogs and a huge margin of error, and it's still not anything you would do to a child. I'm comfortable with the logical and moral inconsistency of putting animals in a different legal and ethical space for practical reasons, but I also believe in not kidding myself where possible.

So what I'm getting at is that I think it's unwise to make an absolute call on it one way or another, but at the very least you want people to make informed decisions about what they are doing with all of the variables on the table. And that, to me, includes attaching the consequences firmly to the choice.

My cats were inside cats for many, many years; the spouse's were inside cats who he'd occasionally let outside because they wanted to go outside, and, well. One of them disappeared and never came back. She was a scrapper, and a rescued feral, so I hope she's still safe, but...no real way of knowing.

When we moved away from the condo in a super-busy area to a house with a fenced yard in a quieter neighborhood, we started letting the cats into the back yard, due to the conveniently pre-installed cat door. (Which can easily be sealed off, mind, so it's not like we had to.) The first several times, we supervised the cats to make sure they weren't too interested in trying to leave the yard and head towards traffic, or skip over/under the six-foot fence towards other neighbors. One cat just wants to sit by the back door and stare out at the grass; the other loves the yard to pieces; we decided to let them both out regularly.

So. Ethics.

I don't think it's necessary to either cat's happiness if they're left out. They were indoor cats for many years, and seemed happy enough then. However, the cat that doesn't really go anywhere seems mildly interested in the back yard, while the cat that wanders further adoooooores the back yard. She is clearly very, very happy to have that option, and I would regret taking it away from her now. That said, if we were forced to move into an apartment and couldn't let her out anymore, I think she'd be upset, but I wouldn't think I was doing something cruel to her.

There is an aspect of self-indulgence in this; the cats are less destructive inside when they have the yard available, and there's a lot less litter-box changing. So I'm not going to pretend that I'm doing this purely out of enlightened respect for my cats' wishes.

All that said? There are a fuck-ton of feral cats in the area, so I don't think we're having any significant effect on the local wildlife, nor are we providing noticeable annoyance to the neighbors with our one occasionally wandering kitty that they weren't getting from other cats before. Since two of our original four cats were rescued ferals--and the other two were a litter descended from a rescued cat that was either stray or feral, not sure which--and all of them have their up-to-date outdoor and indoor shots, I don't think they're particularly at more risk for disease than they were before. (And being fixed, they're not going to add to the population.) Even when we kept them as indoor cats like Responsible People, one or another of them would manage to slip out the door occasionally, and come back ten minutes or ten days later. (The cat that disappeared was the one most likely to be gone for days at a stretch, and the most eager to get outside; she, at least, would've been much happier living in this house with a fenced yard, rather than in that condo.)

On the balance, I'd say that our decision to let the cats outside is roughly neutral. It makes the cats happier, and it makes us happier; it might take down an extra mouse a month, judging by the incompetent hunting attempts of the one cat who tries; it might be a slight health risk to the one cat that wanders. I'm not going to stand up and defend it as the optimal decision, but I'm not especially concerned that I'm doing a bad thing, either.

Cripes, LK.

It, uh... it really shouldn't. Not to this extent.

I don't know what dictionary you looked up "cage" in to find that definition, but mine doesn't define it as "any place that something isn't allowed to leave." Regardless, cats want to go everywhere. They're famous for it, in fact. They want to sneak into your closet and knock over bottles of bleach. They want to lock themselves in the refrigerator. They want to find a way inside the walls of your house and get stuck there. They want to get into the cutlery drawer so they can take out some knives and bat them back and forth with each other. That thing about curiosity killing the cat is no joke; I've had cats get into all kinds of crazy situations that required human intervention to undo, even inside houses. If you have cats that aren't dead, you've restricted their movements at least somewhat. It's just a question of degrees.

Cats understand that large, noisy, fast-moving objects are risky. They don't understand that crossing the street is risky because one such object might appear seemingly out of nowhere, and they don't always understand that running directly away from or across or towards such an object is not the way to avoid it, and they can't predict such an object's movements because their frame of reference is other animals. How many cats have you seen in your life that have been hit by cars? How many humans?

Of course there is. You're the one throwing around broad pronouncements about cages and such.

I'm not sure you do, because it seems like he is making an argument about the pet's true nature where yours is one of convenience and proportionality.

If your cat gets hit by a car it's nature? If a cat gets toxoplasmosis and transmits it to your children, is that just nature? I completely understand not investing in treatment options beyond a certain point, and that line is different for everyone. But "nature" is not just a shorthand for things you don't care about, and the difference for many people is worth defining clearly. I say many people because I've seen you exercise your "underboard" approach to pets before, and I don't think you really have ethical concerns with respect to them outside of outright, purposeless cruelty. I'm not sure this conversation has much to offer you beyond unless for some reason you were unaware of some of the possible effects, and even then I'm sure your answer (if one were sufficiently convincing) would be "ditch the cat uh humanely". Which is a different kind of math.

Yes, although I would expect animal libertarians to be a fringe group. Why do you protect your pet from the world by feeding it? Providing it a warm place in the winter? Stop gilding that cage with the corruption of dependency.

Obviously, it's a question of degrees, and the rationales for the degrees matter. Except when they are nuts.

Pet Welfare?