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.

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.