Our back yard is fenced and catproofed in our new house, so we let them go out when they like. Thing is, they don’t want to go out all that much - they’re institutionalized. They do like to go out and roll in the dirt and eat grass on a nice summer day, though.
I have two cats, live in the middle of a large park (a cemetery, actually). I let them out on a strict schedule, every evening (weather permitting) at 5:00 and they never go far. When I started letting them out, I went out with them, with treats in my pocket, and taught them that coming back when I called was a good thing! They have learned that they get to go outside and hunt things, but suppertime is at 7 and they come back faithfully. Many people think cats can’t be trained, but they are food-motivated, very hip to a schedule, and their brains are the size of walnuts. It’s easy to teach them basic manners if you have a little tuna on your fingers.
I leave a window cracked just enough for a cat to get through, so they can come and go as they please, but only from 5 to 7. The amusing thing about them, though, is that they will RACE in to use the litterbox, then promptly go back out. Why can’t they pee/poo outside?
One other cat hint I would like to share. I’ve had lots of cats own me through the years, and the biggest thing I learned is to NOT feed them tasty food in the morning! I leave kibble out for them all the time, but the ONLY time they get delicious canned food is in the evenings when I call them in. It’s nice to have kitties curl up in my bed, but if they woke me up begging for food in the morning I would much prefer them to be a greasy spot on the wall.
If you do let your cats out, talk to your vet. Outside cats need more inoculations than indoor cats.
My cats are 2 years old. Both fixed, both well armed with claws. The male is like a dog, he follows us everywhere, even down to the dock and boats, sometimes follows the kids to the bus stop. He has disappeared at times for 3 days when we have company visiting.
The female is a little more skittish and is afraid of her shadow in the day. Let her out and she slinks back to the door mewing pitifully to be let inside. But by night she is quite fierce and impossible to catch and bring indoors.
They are both excellent mousers/chippies, hardly see a dead bird and that’s good.
Neither has ever brought home fleas or ticks, however burrs and poison ivy to be sure…
Yes but only in our yard and only one cat. Camry is afraid of the outside and won’t go. He runs away from an open door. He is also too stupid to be let outside as he has gotten lost in the apartment building’s stairwell we used to live in (we used to live in an apartment, not in the stairwell).
Plunket loves to come out with us when we are in the backyard. We watch him as closely as you’d watch a two year old, since our yard is not fenced and is never outside unsupervised (the cat is never unsupervised, not our yard). Still, he rarely even tries to stray far. When it’s time to go in, we open the side door and tell him “Come on-- time to go inside”. He acts just like a two year old too, dragging his feet, head held down all sad, turning around every now and then to look wistfully back at the yard.
I’m thinking about getting an outdoor cat to take care of those damn songbirds.
I’m on the “Too Dangerous for the Cat” roll.
I would let him outside and let him fare for himself, but I don’t think he could make it back up to my 4th floor apartment very well. I haven’t even had a key made up for him yet.
google images/videos for “cat ladder”
Curse you, Muffin.
I’ve spent the last 15 minutes looking at plans for cat ladders, and now I have to build one. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to keep the cat food/water out of reach of our grandson, and how to keep the litterbox (a.k.a. “snack tray”) away from the dog. Putting litterbox, food, and water up high with a cat ladder solves the problem.
I really don’t have time for this project right now, but I have to do it and it’s all your fault.
If I lived in a place I deemed too dangerous for kitty to be outside, I wouldn’t have a cat. Betty is 16 or 17 and prefers the indoors but she still demands to go out at least once a day. I keep the coyote population down and honor her requests.
Ours is an outdoor cat.
I even fitted her with a radio collar, because she was in the habit, in the summer, of not comming in at night.
She certainly gets a lot of mice. I wasn’t even aware that there were that many mice about, but she gets at least one a night, without making a dent in the population, seemingly.
Fortunately she’s not much interested in birds.
It is certainly more dangerous, but she’s very happy with it; I tend to prefer the personalities of the outdoor kitties - unless someone is around all day to entertain them, they sometimes get chronically bored.
We have something resembling a yard (more like some random grassy space between our house and the next one), but no fence, so the boys would probably run away. Besides that, neither of them are into being outside.
Our two cats come and go as they please. Charlie prefers to use the azaleas out front rather than the litter box and I think that’s an excellent feature in a cat. I believe he is also wreaking havoc on the rodent population, but as he never leaves evidence of his genocide, I’m OK with it. (I was much less excited about the half-eaten baby bunny corpse in the yard.) Linus is a weirdo who will not go in or out during daylight hours, so if he doesn’t come in at the end of the evening, he will be out for 24 hours. The cat we are cat-sitting this year stays inside at his owner’s request, but is perpetually pissed off that the other cats get to go out and he doesn’t.
I don’t have a cat now, but when my ex did it had to stay out of the house. The stink! And if my neighbors had a complaint, they should have spoken up to her. Lord knows I did.
Sorry to resurrect, but I have to comment on this. What I’m saying is, if none of the preselected options apply, you can always not pick any of them and respond in the thread itself. Just because you didn’t pick an option doesn’t mean you didn’t respond to the poll. Heck, before we had the preselected options, we still had polls here all the time.
The really flawed polls are those that do not give you anywhere to comment, and/or force a choice between preselected options. Our polls do neither.
I live in the UK where we don’t tend to declaw our cats and we normally let them roam where they will. My two (4yr old female and probaby 5-6yr old male) are both neutered so they’re allowed to come and go as they please.
We had Ophelia as a kitten so we kept her inside from the start, until she was old enough to be neutered and vaccinated, then she was allowed to go and explore outside as much as she pleased. Shadow came to us as a stray with a rather sketchy history, we’re still not entirely sure how old he is, but again we kept him inside until he’d been netuered and vacinnated so that he was fully protected before he was allowed to go exploring.
Both cats are chipped so that if anything happens to them, the vet will be able to identify them. My last cat, Orly, was beautiful but thick as mince. She lived for nearly 12yrs before she tangled with traffic.
My personal view is that cats are outdoor predators and I feel it is cruel to keep them inside if they want to go out. Both of ours are happy to go out and equally happy to spend the day asleep on my bed. As far as I’m concerned, declawing a cat is far more cruel and heartless than letting your mog go out for a bit of air.
My cat is allowed out during the day, but she’s not much of a wanderer anyway. There are too many foxes and other feral creatures in my neighbourhood, to risk letting her out at night.
As much as I’m tempted to pet cats that approach me outside, I prefer to make them suspicious of strangers and shoo them away.
I totally agree.
Ours WANTS to go outside, so pretty regularly we chase her back in. But she is supposed to be an inside cat (and seldom gets farther than our yard when she makes a break for it).
In addition to many other reasons, ours is not completely vaccinated. She’s prone to vaccine related sarcoma and had a vaccine related pre-cancerous lump removed as a kitten after her first round of vaccines, so she only gets what is legally required and can be given nasally.
We have two dogs and two cats. We have a ‘dog door’ so that the dogs can get out into the side yard. It’s pretty tough to prevent the cats from using it.
This x 10. Lucie has never been outside in all of her 18 years so she’d most likely get lost (on the porch, as someone else commented about their own cat) and Sophia was an indoor/outdoor cat with previous owner and I just know she’d be bringing me all kinds of presents and my yakking on them would displease her so for the safety of said presents and my fear of disappointing her with yak, I keep her indoors.
Plus - I don’t want to come home to smooshed cat in driveway. That would break my heart.