We have coyotes, great horned owls, and fishers. All are crepuscular or night-time hunters. We also have foxes, but they are small, and shy, and rarely tangle with cats, which have pointy edges and are nearly their size.
Over the last few decades, this has changed a lot in my neighborhood. Mostly due to people finding their dead cats’ heads left on the lawn. Coyotes.
A great horned owl swooped over us when we were walking our dog (miniature dachshund) when I was in high school. Scary.
Yep, this. Cat lovers make “cattios” against their houses so the cats can kind of go outside yet not be eaten.
They also eat poop. I used to call our Cihuahua snack dispenser, as that’s how the other dogs treated her. I had to make totes into litter boxes, so my daughter’s dogs ( that I’m stuck with) would quit eating out of the regular litter box. 
Dogs are stinky. They seem to like it that way.
This is exactly what I meant. Most cat owners I know keep their cats indoors all or virtually all the time. (I live in a small city.) No dog owners I know do this.
For a different data point, I live in a highrise in a dense citified hunk of otherwise generic suburbia. Of our 400-something apartments, probably 150 have dogs. Might be more like 250, it’s hard to tell. But there are lots and lots of them. It’s actually rather refreshing to take an elevator ride with zero pets in it.
Anyhow, most of these dogs are purse dogs. Or they’re taken outside in a baby carriage and wheeled around. Others are walked on a leash 2x a day to poop. I’ve never seen one of these dogs loose. Not indoors, not outdoors. Always on a string on the rare occasion their widdle feetsies are allowed to touch the ground.
I have to assume there are cats living here too. I’ve never seen one except in a carrier. Presumably about to take a ride to the V-E-T or similar.
I’ve had cats in the past who were difficult to get in and sometimes stayed out all night; but both the current crew and their immediate predecessors seemed to get in the habit and always or almost always show up in the evening. They do often ask to go out again after I think it’s too late, and get mildly annoyed at being prevented.
I agree about the fenced yard – mine are loose on the farm, and as I said I doubt they recognize the human boundaries though cats do have a sense of the boundaries of their own territories; but that’s not going to coincide with the human ideas of where the boundaries are. My parents, after I’d left home, did live in a couple of places where they had an outside cat yard – not only was it fenced around the sides, but also the top of the area was covered with chicken wire or something like it. If the top hadn’t been covered the cats would probably just have gone over the fence.
I can’t have a cat flap*; they’d populate the house with live mice. I want the cats to keep mice out of the house, not to bring them in!
*not that kind of cat flap, anyway. Older cats often get a cat flap, loose skin under the belly. I often have one or more of those around.
Yup. I do that too and I also strongly suspect that it’s relevant.
Here too – in particular coyote.
Yes, when i first had cats i propped the door open for them in nice weather. Then one started bringing baby bunnies and chipmunks into the house. Both live and dead. So we stopped letting them pass through the doors without a human to check. “That’s an outdoor toy”, i used to say to my cat.
I imagine the cat’s reply amounted to “Yeah, so?” 
No, i wouldn’t let her in, because she had a chipmunk in her mouth. She opened her mouth to complain the the startled chipmunk ran off, and she looked at me crankily.
(And similar incidents)
I’ve learned to recognize the “mouse in mouth” meow. It has a particular sort of semi-muffled sound, even when it’s fairly loud. Do not open door wide to the mouse-in-mouth meow.
Sometimes the creature in the mouth isn’t a mouse.
My cat used to steal food from the neighbours’ houses and bring it home through the catflap. I’ve had a loaf of bread and a whole (hot) leg of lamb before now. Live mice also. And a dead pigeon which she proceeded to shred/pluck feathers all over the kitchen floor.
I grew up with a series of black Labradors, their ability to put out offensive smells was impressive.
Though it was not from their coat, rather their alimentary system.
“Murder mittens” is the Reddit term!