Thinking About Cats Today

Is your cat an outdoor cat or an indoor cat?  & outdoor cat here means "a cat allowed outdoors that spends some time indoors."

There are those who feel obliged to honor their furry companion's genetic programming by letting it outdoors to spray & kill whatever its tiny heart desires.  Should you live in an urban setting, this is practically a guarantee that your "pet" (said with a verbal caveat represented here by quotation marks) will live a truncated lifespan.  Did it or you make that trade-off?

Then there are those who wants to make their kitten's life as safe & happy as possible, & keep the cat indoors, even though it does seem to want to get outside, to chase falling leaves, to explore rustling sounds, to chase bugs & birds.  Such cats will most probably live very long lives - the average cat age is twelve to fifteen years, but some can live as long as twenty.

Here is a list of the things that can happen to an outdoor cat which may severely truncate its lifespan: "traffic accidents, fights with other cats, intentional acts of violence, poisoning (accidental or intentional), diseases caught from other cats, being picked up by animal control & subsequently euthanized if not claimed, & death caused by predators."


It's also worth noting that cats allowed outdoors kill lots of birds.  Lots of them.  Perhaps up to a billion a year.

The cats that populate the Self Help Radio landscape stay indoors.  One of them is too frightened to go outside.  One of them has asthma, & would most probably suffer needlessly, & die horribly, if she strayed & did not get her medicine.  The third is tough black cat who just turned six who'd doubtless be a terrific hunter - but who has a low white blood cell count & would probably succumb to the first infection that came his way.

They are all loved to distraction.  They stay indoors because their presence is required as long as humanly (& felinely) possible.