What can we do?
We must remember why the outdoors is dangerous.
Cats aren’t doing anything they don’t do in the house. They are just doing it in more dangerous places.
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Help them not get lost. If they fall asleep in an obscure place in the house, nothing bad will happen. If they do it outdoors, it can be in a moving van or in a place that is now shut up for the night. So we should get them micro-chipped. It’s better than a collar and they can’t lose it. Never put a collar they can’t get out of on a cat; that could be the very thing that traps them.
There’s an extra measure of safety if we also use a breakaway collar with id tags. It shows the cat is owned, which can offer them extra protection in many states.
Offer sanctuary. We should make sure the cat always has a way of getting back into the house, or some other safe place, right away. Invest in a cat door, or create an outdoor house where they can stay warm and feel they can defend themselves. Many cats get lost because they got frightened and bolted into unknown territory to hide. If they know they have a good hiding place nearby, that is where they will bolt to.
Try to get them inside at night. Letting the cat out at night might be a time-honored tradition, but cats are in more danger from cars than anything else outdoors. Things that might hunt them down are more likely to hunt at night. So ration their outdoor times to the daylight hours.
Be ready to search for them. If they “break curfew,” don’t hesitate to go out and try to round them up. We can let them know which direction home is, and they can start heading back. It can draw their attention to some bodily needs which can be taken care of there. It will also show the neighborhood whose cat they are, and that we care about them.
Get an enclosure. The very best thing to do is create a “room outdoors” where they can have a good time without our worrying about them. The Kitty Store Online has some clever ideas and well-designed arrangements.
There are ways of helping our cat stay out of the trouble their wild side wants to get them into.
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There’s more ways to care for our cat with The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See all of my posts on CAT CARE.
It does make me nuts that my cats go outside, but I live in a single wide mobil home, and these kittens etc. are all feral cats and I think they would rather die than stay in the house all the time. I am home a lot, so I am always calling them and we live a long ways from the road. I did have one cat disappear and never did find out what happened to him. That was awful, but at least he was happy while he was alive. And the kittens come in at night, at least some of them do. The last three wild ones I can guarantee you, will not stay in the house.
Marg Elmendorf´s last blog ..Goats, goats and more goats
Outdoors cats: DON’T.
I live in a suburb, and yet we have coyotes in the backyard. There are cars. There are psychos who live in my condo complex.
I’m not kidding. When Byron was young, I would take him outside for a walk, as he always followed me like a dog. Everyone who met him loved him, and thought it was great how he followed me.
One day, he decided that he needed to sit under every car in the parking lot. I did my best to coax him out, but the only thing that would work was to flush him out by waving a snowbrush under the car. Then a guy, already drunk and holding a can of Natural Ice in his hand at 1PM, began screaming “GET THAT FUCKING CAT FROM UNDER MY CAR!”
The drunk wasn’t in the car, or even wanting to use it. “Let me get him out,” I said, but before I could, his insane and also drunken girlfriend got in the car and tried to run Byron over.
If that’s not enough motivation for you to keep your cat indoors–and the fact that indoor cats live an average of 15 years, while outdoor ones live only 5–before this Byron got into the woods behind my condo. I grabbed him before he got in too deep, and he rewarded me thus. I still have the scar on the nose. Turned out like Androcles and the lion, he had a thorn in his paw that I didn’t know about before I picked him up, and I pressed it further in. He was scared enough that it took him an hour to come home. An hour before sunset, an hour before the coyotes start coming out.
And these were supervised visits. Coyotes eat cats, raccoons can give them rabies, your neighbors may already be rabidly drunken cat-haters. Keep the cats in, if you want to keep them alive.
I agree, Bill; crazy neighbors are even worse than predatory animals. The animals are just following their instincts.
After losing one cat because I didn’t know how dangerous letting her out was, and losing another cat when a roommate accidentally let him out; I became a solid indoor-only cat owner.
Marg also has a point; ferals can be retrained sometimes, but when this behavior becomes embedded, it’s difficult to change.
That’s why I offer ways of retraining our cats to enjoy the indoors.