Outdoor Cats - Tumblr Posts
"But have you considered that tossing a cat outdoors is far easier and requires zero introspection from me? Honestly!" - Literally everyone responding.
Where I live, if your off-leash dog runs under a car and causes an accident, the dog owner is to blame. I long for the day the same law applies to cat owners as well. If you have an animal, what it does and what happens to it is your responsibility.
Talking to Outdoor Cat People
@voidofstars136 said: Hello, I volunteer at a wildlife hospital (in Australia). We get a great deal of cat-attack victims coming in, and I was hoping you knew of any particular methods to get people to keep their cats inside. I have an indoor-only cat, and I’ve successful managed to get an indoor-outdoor cat into a indoor-only before, but I cannot seem to convince anyone to do the same. Question Tax: What is your favourite parrot species?
Ah, that old chestnut.
In all my years of blogging, Outdoor Cat People, those that make excuses to justify letting their cat free roam outside (and bad excuses at that, apparently there are no cars, lilies, hazardous weather, dogs, wild predators, asshole humans, rat poison, etc where they live and Indoor cats are ‘an American thing’ despite my feet being firmly in Australia) have been some of the most obnoxious individuals to deal with online.
They are marginally more rewarding to deal with in person, if only because they maintain their manners and decide to be polite to your face and ignore you later.
The problem is, you can have a million excellent reasons to keep cats indoor only, but Outdoor Cat People will not care. They believe they are entitled to let their cat roam outdoors unsupervised (and many will have difficulty comprehending that sentence. Roaming outdoors unsupervised does not include supervised on a harness or confined to a cat run). They believe either that their cat is so special nothing bad will ever happen, or that it’s just ‘part of life’ and they couldn’t possibly have prevented this.
If they don’t care enough about their cats welfare to keep it inside, they aren’t going to care about the wildlife that they probably don’t believe their cat is hunting anyway.
If you just walk up to them and go ‘you should keep your cat inside’ you will be met with dismissal at best, and hostility at worse.
There is a window of opportunity when they can actually see a consequence of their cat being outside. At the moment our clinic waiting room is plastered with ‘Missing Cat’ posters, and that opens up a conversation with some people about keeping their beloved cats indoors, lest they go missing too.
I have this conversation after every cat fight, every wound, every injured wildlife found in a backyard and maybe 20% of them consider changing their cat’s lifestyle. Some of them will even stick with it.
There is more room to influence first time cat owners, those with new kittens. If they start out indoor only, they are more likely to stay that way.
I don’t have a magic method to talk people into doing the right thing, because letting their cats outside is convenient and easy for them, and they wont see the consequences until the last day.
My favorite parrot is a hard one. Right now it’s probably the cockatiel, for fitting so much b*stard in such a small body.
Feel free to unfollow me right now if you believe it’s okay to endanger your house cat or the local native fauna it absolutely will kill by allowing it outside unsupervised/off lead.
Outdoor cats have a lifespan of 2-5 years. Indoor cats regularly live 15+, even getting up to 20+ sometimes. Unsupervised indoor-outdoor cats often don’t make it past 5 and the ones that do are a very lucky exception. Why?
They get hit by cars. They get attacked by other animals (predators or other pets like dogs) including other cats. They eat things that are toxic to them. They get killed by other humans. They contract diseases like FIV and FelV.
Even if your cat DOES live longer than 5 years, cats that go outside are responsible for the deaths of billions of birds and other small fauna per year. There have been studies done on this. It’s not people pulling stuff out of their asses, it’s something scientists literally studied and reported results on. Don’t believe me? Google “do cats kill wildlife” and have a read. They’re on the IUCN’s list of worst invasive species and have contributed to the extinction of 60+ species, and they continue to cause a problem for other threatened species of small animals.
If you think it’s okay to expose your cat to these hazards and potentially cut its lifespan by more than half, if you think it’s okay to allow your cat to kill native fauna to indulge it’s “natural instincts” instead of, I don’t fucking know, playing with it with toys literally designed to allow it to safely indulge those instincts, then you have no business following me.
I’m not here to indulge your whimsy about how cats “need” to be outside unsupervised to be stimulated and lead a happy life- I can assure you, they don’t. There are p l e n t y of enrichment devices and structures people can buy or make to ensure that their cats lead happy, full lives indoors to the ripe old age they are supposed to lived to.
You also have the option of lead training your cat if you really believe they need to go out. This is something that proponents of “let cats go outside” ignore almost completely. They somehow believe that it’s all or nothing- either the cat lives 100% indoors without ever seeing sunlight OR it’s let outside without supervision where it can be injured, killed, or cause harm to the environment. Those aren’t the only choices. Cats adapt to leads very easily. They don’t like it the first couple of times, usually, but also usually when they figure out lead=outside, they get over it and the best of both worlds gets to happen- your cat remains safely under your supervision where it cannot come to or deliver harm, and it gets to go outside.
TL;DR Letting your house cat outside unsupervised is extremely dangerous both for your cat and the local wildlife and people arguing otherwise can see themselves out the door because I’m not about people endangering animals out of willful ignorance. You, along with every other pet owner out there, have a responsibility to protect your pets to the best of your abilities, and choosing not to do so in some misguided attempt to indulge their whims is poor animal husbandry. Any argument to the contrary is just an excuse to continue doing things which put animals in danger.
Okay, so I see a lot of people on this post saying "you should never let your cats outside", but like... What if you can't let them INside?
Like, in my house, we have a snake, an aquarium full of fish and (although this one's less important) a couch on the first floor. All of those things would be at risk if we let the cats that hang out at our yard indoors. And also my dad is allergic to cat hair. And ALSO the cats really don't like when people limit their space, and they often start tearing stuff up when someone tries to. And, like... What should we do, stop feeding them and taking them to the vet because of that? That just sounds really evil! And like- we have about six cats that live around us. Literally what else would you guys want us to do?
He's mad. ITS FUCKING TRUE YOU DONT CARE ABT UR CAT IF YOU LEAVE UR CAT OUTSIDE UNSUPERVISED.
this convo started bc there's an outdoor cat on my street and i want her in my house so bad. She legit follwed me to the door
He's mad. ITS FUCKING TRUE YOU DONT CARE ABT UR CAT IF YOU LEAVE UR CAT OUTSIDE UNSUPERVISED.
this convo started bc there's an outdoor cat on my street and i want her in my house so bad. She legit follwed me to the door
Missing out: A longer one! It's no secret that I am not a fan of outdoor cats in the slightest. They're an ecological nightmare and feral cats are responsible for an astounding amount of harm to native fauna. But there's another side to it. Being an outdoor cat is TERRIBLE. Being in ER Vet-Med I have seen every bad thing that can happen to an outdoor cat; Dog attacks, Hit by car, Parasites, Poisonings, Snake Bites, Cat Fight Injuries -- it's rough out there!
Eggs Benedict (the cat who I don't shut up about recently) is an ex-stray we adopted who has just had the hardest go of it. Fungal lung infection, 3 strands of cat-scratch fever, potentially hit by a car, potentially burst ear drums, worms, fleas and stomatitis so bad he had to have every tooth pulled. This is a reality for outdoor cats. If you love them, keep them indoors.
by HeckoGecko
please keep your cat indoors forever
i feel like i'm watching a car crash in slow motion
I’m begging. They die. And they die. And they die. Even if they manage to live to old age, they don’t go easily or comfortably. If they live past kittenhood, the older they are, the easier a target they become and the higher their odds of hitting coyote/toxoplasmosis/car/etc lottery
i'll tell you what converted me to being all-in on keeping cats indoors only:
living for a year and a half in a rural area with a sudden feral cat colony explosion on the property.
i moved in with my folks for a bit and at that time, one (1) stray cat mama had taken up residence on the property, but was too feral to let my mother anywhere near her. but especially after she brought three kittens around, mom fed her and the kittens in hopes they'd grow trusting enough she could catch for spay and neuter at the minimum. momcat stayed mean and hella wary, but the kittens would hang around a little nearer and play with my mom via long stick, but still wouldn't come close enough to touch or catch.
unfortunately, two of the three kittens were girls and started having kittens of their own before further progress was made, shortly after i moved in. and that was pretty much instant doom.
there were so many kittens. SO MANY. multiple litters. every time we turned around, more kittens.
we fed them. we hunted for and located the kittens every time anywhere on the property and would move them to a repurposed doghouse anytime a mama cat had them somewhere else, so that they could grow up human-socialized and we could spay/neuter them when they were old enough. (also it was a handy tactic to push the issue of the mamas getting more used to/trusting of us themselves. only really worked with one of them, though.)
and we watched them die.
we watched litter after litter of kittens never make it to the age they could be spayed or neutered. the moms stayed, for the longest time, too skittish to more than briefly touch, much less catch and crate for a vet visit.
it sounds like a silly joke to say i have kitten-related ptsd, but i absolutely do.
too many goddamn times i'd walk out of the garage and find the carport and gravel drive strewn with tiny bodies. others simply went missing, never to be found.
one in particular, i wish i hadn't found, and the visual literally haunts me still, almost a decade later.
i saw so many kittens die of snake bite, spider bite, wild dogs, birds of prey, hit by cars, respiratory illness, covered in fleas and eyes crusted with infection.
and we loved them all. scrimped for antibiotics if the vet could be convinced to give it to us despite our being unable to bring them in. bought flea collars and ointments. we cared for them and fed them and petted them and played with them, brushed their fur and cleaned up their little faces, put ice in their water in hot summer, rigged a heating lamp in their house in the winter.
and they died. horribly. that property is pocked with unmarked graves of kittens and cats.
all the best intentions, not enough resources, and it didn't matter anyways because the population went from three to almost twenty (at times, over thirty) in the blink of an eye.
they died and died and died. our hearts broke over and over again. the stress and anxiety wore us down like sandpaper. i think, by the end of it all, we managed to find less than 10 of them all homes, including batman the disabled kitten i found a home across the country through tumblr.
it was carnage and tragedy, frankly. and we were helpless.
it only ended because they started dying faster than they could be born, and because we finally caught the two remaining mom cats in traps and got them spayed.
the points about outdoor cats being invasive predators devastating to local wildlife populations is true and valid and important.
but i know cat people, and cat people who don't know better than to let cats outdoors. what matters to you is the cat itself, generally. the cat being happy and taken care of.
keeping cats outdoors, letting them outdoors, is not taking care of the cats. it's not protecting them. it's not giving them any happiness or invigoration that couldn't be provided to them as indoor-only pets with just a little research and effort.
they die. they get ill. they get hurt. they're at risk of predators, and cars, and disease, and carelessly cruel children and deliberately cruel adults. they're at risk of disappearing on you because someone else saw a cat outdoors and intervened to give it a better, safer life not in conflict with the local environment.
and if that offends and angers you that someone would just take a cat they saw roaming outdoors, even collared, and that it sounds like i'm endorsing that, i am, but not if you intervene and be that person yourself for your own cat.
if what matters to you is doing right by your cat because it's family and a living creature whose happiness and health and safety is important to you,
keep them indoors. not part time. always. exclusively.
edit: since apparently i need to clarify this, i'm saying cats should live inside, that they should not live outdoors, even part time. visiting the outdoors supervised on a leash or in an enclosed catio is not the same as even part-time living outside, and i am certainly not advocating against it.
Thought I’d show you guys some pictures of cats/kittens I’ve seen outside 😍🤍
Tyla (one of the outdoor cats that likes to visit us almost daily), is very kind & beautiful 🤍🖤🧡
Good morning, more pictures of our outdoor cats 😌🧡🤍🖤🩶
Tangerine jr. relaxing & playing outside 🧡
This outdoor cat we’ve decided to call Imposter, because they look like our Sylvester color wise lol
Baby Tangerine Jr. playing with a cat toy🥹🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡
Tangerine jr. is so gorgeous and he’s so soft.
Some of the outdoor cats that visit us ✨☀️
TANGERINE JR. SAYS HAPPY PRIDE!!! 🌈🏳️🌈🌈🏳️🌈🌈🏳️🌈🌈
Mother & her kittens outside 🥹💓💓💓
This is my favorite video of Tangerine jr., he’s so beautiful.