agro-carnist: lilies-and-lesbians: lilies-and-lesbians: talesfromtreatment: lilies-and-lesbians: agr
talking to outdoor cat defenders like
I get so fucking frustrating reading posts like these.
Say what you want but I think that depriving cats of their natural environment is he same thing as letting them out and having a hunting problem. Except you can easily solve the hunting problem by sticking a bell on the cat, or letting it have supervised outside time. If you’re worried about your cat running away from you, then, spoiler alert, you aren’t a good cat owner. Another pro is that having your cats acclimated to your neighborhood prevents them from getting lost if they do get out. I hate this ‘issue’ and I hate people on both sides who seem to exist only to call their opposition terrible people. The comments on this post are just full of people willfully ignoring the other sides points and calling them names and generally being assholes. There are valid points on both sides, and context is so important. If you live in the middle of a city, yeah, leaving your cat outside is irresponsible and dangerous. But if you live in the countryside without busy roads and have a cat that works to catch mice and other pests, then let them do that. There are so many subtleties to this debate and I’m so tired of all the people straw manning the other party.
There are no “subtleties” in this issue. You don’t say there are “subtleties” to letting a small child run around outside without supervision, or leaving a short haired dog outside in the snow with no shelter, or letting your dog terrorize and eat your neighbor’s chickens, or other forms of neglect and poor animal husbandry. Bells do NOTHING to inhibit a cat’s ability to hunt. They are capable of hunting even with a bell. The country still has dangers to cats. I see more roadkill cats in the countryside than in the city, and you have more predators that will eat cats, and there are still free roaming cats and dogs that will maim your animals. I see SO many outdoor cats whose owners live in the country come into the vet clinic with swollen faces and broken bones and respiratory disease and oozing wounds. The vast majority of emergency cat cases that require intense care and oftentimes EUTHANASIA are country cats. Stop trying to see “both sides” of a topic about objectively shitty animal care that is backed by science and statistics
Cats were bred not necessarily domesticated to be pets, for most of history, they have been used to hunt pests and be working animals. I have seen so many statistics for both sides of this issue, and I am so tired of arguing about it. There are ways to supervise your cats time outside and I have known so many cats in my (small, relatively secluded) neighborhood and I have never, not once seen a cat killed by any means that you have mentioned. My cats are indoor and outdoor animals and I am honestly very offended by the notion that I do not love or spend time enriching my cats lives just because I let them out. My cats enjoy going out. They follow me on walks and stay clear of roads and only ever hunt mice. They also love being inside, played with them cuddled and pampered. There are environments where cats cat thrive outdoors. There are also environments where it is dangerous.
Also please stop comparing cats to other animals and especially small human children. Cats posses countless evolutionary instincts and advantages that human children do not possess and it is a completely different matter. But on that note, children are capable of playing outside without getting harmed? I was always going in the woods when I was a relatively young child. I was perfectly safe and immensely enjoyed those experiences.
Cats have the reasoning power of a *toddler*. This is an animal that will not use a litterbox to pee in of it has a uti because it begins to associate the box with the pain as in “box makes me hurt.” they are not creatures with large abilities to reason or find the true correlations between things. cats happily munch on toxic plants all the time. They get eaten by neighbor dogs all the time. They get run over all the time and every cat that was run over was “smart enough to avoid cars” until that one time it got turned into hamburger.
If your cat is ever out of your direct supervision while uncontained outside you cannot claim that they never go in the street. You cannot claim that they only eat mice and never lizards or birds.
Congrats that you’ve not seen any of this. I’ve never seen anyone die in a car crash, therefore car crashes and driving safely aren’t important because they don’t happen and can’t possibly happen to me or anyone I know.
If you want your cats to spend time outside, build a catio or leash train them. Then everyone is safe.
My cats bring home everything they catch and are never far from the house, so it stands to reason that they only catch mice because they have never brought anything else. I am outside a lot, I observe my cats, very rarely do they approach the road (one doesn’t go near it at all) the vast majority of their time is spent lounging in the sun. Your logic of car crashes does not really apply, it moreover just proves my point that some places are safer than others. Car crashes are less common than cats getting hit. Also as a vet tech, have ever considered that maybe you see injured outdoor cats very often is because… that’s why you bring them to the vet.
I am all for keeping cats inside, I don’t really approve (in most cases) of leaving cats outside unsupervised 24/7 but my cats without fail come when called, and it never takes them more than a minute or two. Most of the time when I look outside I can see them perfectly.
Also, I am not trying to say that cats are by any means smarter than human children. They simply possess instincts and abilities that human children do not, because they are animals that have survived and evolved that way, whereas human babies live much more sheltered lives.
Also would like to note that a fair amount of people do not get cats because they want a cuddly lovable pet, they get a cat for pest control
Working animals don’t get to do whatever they want either. Terriers were bred to hunt small animals, that doesn’t mean its ok for them to run around mauling whatever they please. Working animals still need human supervision! Working animals stay in a specific space where they work. What kind of dumbass are you to think that being a “working animal” means just leaving it to its own devices? Not to mention cats were not purposefully bred to be pest control, they were animals that liked to hang around people because there was food and ended up somesticating themselves. But even so, cats make shit pest control. This is documented and studied. The harm they do to native species outweighs their rodent control.
And, dude, I’m sorry but “they have evolutionary instincts” is one of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever heard. There is no evolutionary instinct to look both ways before crossing the road. Theres also no evolutionary instinct to not fight other cats because they do that ALL THE TIME. Or one to know when a mouse they’ve hunted has ingested rat poison and therefore ingested it themselves. And also, sheep have evolutionary advantages to avoid predators, that doesn’t mean I’m going to let a wolf in sheep pasture.
And also, you have NO IDEA that your cats bring you everything they catch. You have NO basis to say that. Cats don’t bring home everything they hunt. Sometimes they eat it themselves or just leave a headless body where they killed it. Cats kill a LOT of animals because they hunt for sport. It baffles me that you guys claim to know whatever your cat does outside when it’s not where you can see it. You’re like weirdo parents that claim to know everything about their kids and there are no secrets. You don’t. It’s dumb as hell to claim so.
I still have yet to see an even slightly reasonable argument from outdoor cat defenders. Everything is just the most wackadoodle shit that’s just reaching for a justification and ignores everything we know about animal care and treats cats like some magical exception. Every outdoor cat owner thinks their cat is so special. When your cat gets hurt or sick or killed because of something that happened while it was outdoors you will have NO RIGHT to be upset because people warned you and you didn’t listen but instead created a fantasy full of excuses. Don’t you dare cry. You willfully chose those risks when you didn’t have to
Mon, 18 Apr 2022 07:41:04
