I’ve actually seen this a few times whilst walking our dog. People put their (soon to be dead) cats outside leashed up. Don’t they know this pretty much renders the cat defenseless? All it takes is some stray dog or raccoon or whatever and it’s hello kitty heaven. If you have a cat and you’re doing this, please stop.
I’ve tethered my cat on our porch before, when I had to be inside to do something and she was howling to go out. She was, however, directly in front of the window, where I could watch her and come to her rescue should any unfriendly animals come around. And frankly, given the cat in question, I fear for the dog that approaches her.
All the cats I’ve had would have broken their necks trying to get free.
Eponine loves going for walks on her leash, always has. It’s a much better option than a) letting her out on her own to play in traffic or b)keeping her inside all the time and listening to her howl constantly, causing me to lose it and bounce her off the wall.
I suppose you think that the cat should be allowed to run free and untethered, neverminding the havoc it will wreak on the local bird/squirrel/bunny population. Of course, your response would be something along the lines of "Well, that’s just something cats do." :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Sheesh.
I would caution against it based on personal experience. It isn’t as much a question of kitty being defenseless as it is the possibility of strangulation. My parents used to do this all the time with our cat Babu when he would pull the Howl and Hurl against glass deck doors. For months it was great, we gave him a long runwire of sorts and he could stomp about the grass in the first half of our backyard. It was attached to one of those stretchy collars so it limited running fast and jerking back hard at the end of the tether. Anyway, he quickly learned about how far it could go. All was good until the day he wound his runwire around and around the deck furniture (for some reason we will never figure out), saw a butterfly and jumped off. Fortunately, our neighbour’s daughter realised after a couple of minutes of his hanging himself that he wasn’t going to get loose so she got my father from upstairs (he works in the house) to cut him loose. He spent 3 days in the hospital and we rightfully spent a lot of money over our stupidity. Needless to say, we never leashed him again since there’s no way we can detach the deck from our house. My parents live in a semi-rural town with very little traffic in our area so we finally decided to make him a limited out door cat. He’s trained to come back after 3 hours on a whistle my sister created and taught him on.
Wow-that was five years ago…time does fly…
Well, my cat has somehow survived eleven years of this inhumane treatment. Granted, I keep an eye on her, but there aren't that many critters that can take on a cat wandering around. You might consider reserving your wrath for people who let dogs roam around other people's yards attacking their pets.
I personally don't think it's humane to keep cats indoors all their life and I'm not willing to have my cat get lost or run over by a car. So that leaves a lead.That was my thinking, too, with my first cat. My partner at the time thought it was inhumane to keep a cat inside, but I live on a busy road and also think it’s irresponsible to let a cut run around loose outside (except maybe out in the country), so I thought it would be a great idea to train him to a leash.
This I did with moderate success and would walk him around the yard and let him enjoy nature. Then I started getting lazy and would leave him out unsupervised on a rope tied to a cinderblock. He had just enough rope to leap on and attach himself to a big tree and it was cute and funny. It turned out he had enough rope to get stuck way up in the tree with the rope all wrapped around the limb. Thank goodness he wasn’t hanging.
Also, I didn’t think of a stretchy thing and he would run to the end of the tether, only to be jerked back in a painful-looking way. So I decided it was more inhumane to leave this cat on a rope outside than to leave him inside (now, if you have time to supervise the cat the whole time and aren’t lazy like me to the point the cat is tethered out there unsupervised and getting into all kinds of trouble, I say go for it, let the cat enjoy some outside time).
But as anyone who has had a cat that goes outside knows, the cat will take every opportunity to get out once it has been out, and will rush every door you open to the outside. He got out and ran away and I never saw him again, despite days and weeks of looking. Retrospectively, I don’t blame him for running away. I just hope someone picked him up and gave him a home.
That was over 10 years ago. I got another cat a year or so after the cat-on-a-rope ran away and decided this one would be inside-only. She is still with me today, healthy, and a very happy cat, as far as I can tell.
There’s another thread going on right now about the inhumanity (or not) of torturing animals; that one and this one just show that people have widely varied opinions on just what is humane and what is inhumane.
Sorry, link to the other thread if you’re interested.
There are actually some pretty good cat harnesses on the market that, instead of working like a regular collar which puts pressure on the neck, will wrap around kitty’s shoulders so that he won’t strangle or hurt himself.
This method works very well for a friend of mine’s cat, and in fact the cat will not allow anyone to take his harness off.
Very sorry to hear that Atalia. I would never argue that keeping a cat on a leash is cruel per se. However, I would say my whole family was short-sighted, naive and irresponsible in that we kept him on such a long runwire and only kept an eye out about 2/3rds of the time. Thankfully, we were spared the loss and learned our lesson.
It really does depend on both the cat, where you live and how careful you are. Kitty may very well have a good time on the leash as long as there’s no possibility of hanging or danger that requires hasty retreat and there’s someone around to keep an eye on him.
As an aside, I always thought keeping a cat indoors all the time was sort of unfair and vowed that I wouldn’t get a cat until I settled down somewhere with trees and grass for limited outdoors playtime (like my parents established). But I decided it would be far worse to let my sweet little abandoned kitty get gassed at all the overcrowded shelters around my university town than to stay inside my apartment with plenty o toys and food and water and heat when I’m at school.
That about sums it up.
Torgo, the ones you’ve seen, do they appear to be supervised at all or are these cats simply tied up somewhere outside? I’m interested in the circumstances of what you’ve seen; is it the suburbs, city or countryside, are the cats on long leads in a backyard, on a short leash tied to the mailbox, or what?
That’s what I wonder as well. We tie our cat to a lead in our back yard, and he’s perfectly fine out there. I don’t believe for a second that we’re putting him in any danger by doing so, and in fact, he’s probably safer than if he were allowed to roam about the neighborhood. He wears a harness rather than a collar, so there’s no risk of strangulation. The yard is fenced in, so there are no marauding dogs. And he’s bigger than most of the raccoons I’ve seen, so I’m not too worried about that either. Thanks for your concern, Torgo, but we’ll keep putting the cat on the lead.
And the beast mentioned above, Scooter, has been tied to line in my yards in Buffalo, NY, Yarmouth, ME, Beaufort, SC, and now Miami, FL over the last ten years. He is afraid of neither cars nor dogs, and I attribute his longevity to his restraint. I’ve seen him smack overly-playful dogs across the snout, I’ve seen him chase dogs. But I have never seen a dog try to attack him. Most people raise their pets properly, I guess.
The OP isn’t talking about going for walks on a leash, they are talking about unattended cats tied up outside. A friend of mine’s cat strangled to death this way. If you want to tie up your cat outside while you are right there outside with the cat that is a different thing entirely.
I see nothing supporting this in the OP. I agree 100% with the OP and you know what? My cats stay inside. If I thought they would tolerate it, I’d walk them on a leash but they freak out if I try so they stay inside. They’re happy, they run around the house and don’t even care about looking out the windows. They also never go near the doors. They really don’t seem even interested in what lies beyond “their world”. (It isn’t inhumane, Finagle)
Long lead vs short lead:
long lead = more chances for strangulation
short lead = less room for escape in case of a dog/other cat/coyote/whatever came by.
All in all, I think that an unsupervised tied up cat is a bad thing. If you DO put your cat on a lead, I hope that A) your yard is fenced so that dogs cannot get in and B) you use either a break-away collar or a harness that doesn’t put pressure on the neck.
My cats HATE the outdoors. Whenever I bring them out to our front yard they freak out, get all puffy and make a beeline for the door. Not all cats yearn for the outdoors.
I am referring to cats tied to what seem to be rather short leads…I’d figure no more than 6-10 feet…unsupervised (“supervised” to me means you’re sitting your ass next to the cat) in unfenced yards or out on the front porch. You may argue that you have an enclosed yard; ever see the ease with which raccoons, weasels and other stray cats can hop a fence? I’m no vet but it seems to me that cats have two major lines of defense: claws and running away. When you confine a cat out in the open to a 6, 10 or even 20 feet range of movement you’ve pretty much narrowed those lines down to one; and I think most stray pit-bulls looking for trouble would chuckle at the claws.
I’m sure y’all are good people and love your cats to death and wouldn’t harm a hair on their furry heads but I truly think you should think twice on this one. Any vets out there have an opinion on this?
Opal, if you’d read my first post, you’d know that Eppy gets tethered outside on her harness when I don’t have the opportunity to walk her. The post you quoted was a clarification based on Stoid’s comment about cats hurting themselves trying to get away.
I’m not a vet, but I am a vet tech. Before we moved to North Carolina, I lived in an apartment on the same lot as the clinic, and tethered Eponine on the porch with the knowledge and approval of both vets. I was never more than 45 seconds away from her, and was usually watching her through the window as I did laundry or washed dishes or whatever. If I couldn’t keep an eye on her, she didn’t go out.
And yes, her lead was never more than a few feet long. She sometimes jumped from our balcony to the top of a car in the parking lot when she was off-leash, so I had to make sure her tether didn’t stretch to the edge of the balcony. After all, I didn’t want her dangling from her harness over the parking lot.
I read the whole thread, thank you.
I singled that out because I wanted to make a point that I wasn’t against walking cats on a leash or tethering them if they are supervised.
It is really all about risk management IMO. I just wish more parents took a good care of their children as you all do of your pets.
Q, Who here believes that an unsupervised cat on a tether is bad enough that they will go and remove the animal form that person and fight in court to do so?