Mar102010
If you let your cat outside, you’re a bad person
Filed under wildlife by david brooks at 10:11 pm
My column in the Telegraph today starts out deliberately provocatively:
As a cat owner, I am comfortable making the following statement: If you let your cat outdoors, you are a bad person.
Oh, yes, you are. No matter what excuses you hide behind, you have chosen to release a wildlife-slaughtering machine on the great outdoors: You might as well be scattering poisoned birdseed and filling the woods with mousetraps
It hasn’t drawn as many comments as I expected - only 8 so far, and no frenzied response from the “it’s unnatural to keep your cat indoors” crowd.
March 10th, 2010 at 10:03 pm
It might attack you if you keep it in too long. If It likes to strike havoc on that outside world, then that's their problem, I'm not getting in the middle of it. If he wants to go out then I will.
March 11th, 2010 at 2:48 am
Very well written write-up. I literally enjoyed the concept described in the post. Once again nice work indeed.
March 12th, 2010 at 8:46 am
We seem to attract stay cats, currently have three but have had as many as four. Of the three one has been declawed so has to stay indoors. Even when well fed cats hunt, perhaps they are like humans and enjoy killing for sport. Of the two outdoor cats only one is a serious hunter, the other one just kind of tags along. Most of the kills are Chipmunks, hardly an endangered species, and the occasional bird. We feed wild birds so it is sad when the cat kills one, but it is infrequent enough that we don't agonize over it. Plus the birds seem to enjoy teasing the cat.
Interesting enough a couple of years ago a mouse (or mouse family) got into the house. The only cat interesting in hunting was the declawed one, who eventually succeeded.
March 12th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Most of the kills *that you know of* are chipmunks, perhaps because they live close to the house. What are they hunting in the neighbor's yard, or the woods nearby? What are they injuring badly but not capturing for you to see?
My four cats are all indoors - it's a bit of a pain, but not that bad.
March 12th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Actually, I hate cats. So whether they are in or out makes no never mind to me, but if a cat kills a bird or another small animal, that is the way nature intended it and to get one's knickers in a twist about it is absurd.
I only wish we were as concerned about how we get involved in killing wars that end up killing civilians. Seems to me that civilians should be kept indoors during wars and not let out to be killed.
March 13th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Responding only to the first paragraph: It's not the way nature intended, because the housecat is fed and housed - it has an unfair (unnatural, if you will) advantage in the “red in tooth and claw” competition. When a bobcat kills your chipmunks or a red-tailed hawk kills your songbirds, that's natural.
“knickers in a twist”! Either you've been reading too much PG Wodehouse or you're an import.
March 13th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
[...] long as I’m insulting pet owners, let’s take a well-deserved swipe at people who buy exotic reptiles, because they are bad [...]
March 14th, 2010 at 9:36 am
Interesting that the concept is only about cats hunting. What about cats being hunted? Chased by dogs, fishers, other cats, cars, foxes, owls. They have natural preditors we well and isn't that what keeps species under control? Red squirrels eat wiring, rodents bring pestilance, fox and fishers hunt the same things cats do. So and here it is, it is unnatural to keep cats indoors, it is psychologically disturbing to them and can create unnatural behavior. Yes I hate to think of all the creatures that they chase but don't eat, but that again is a part of the natural world and not all cats hunt. Perhaps we should be MORE concerned with the preditors that hunt our children and abuse our elderly or their spouses? Perhaps if we got our priorities in line, I would have more concern for what my cat is doing. Oops there she goes, wonder what that is dangling from her mouth?
March 14th, 2010 at 10:05 am
I don't really understand the argument “you shouldn't try to improve X because Y is worse” unless somehow tackling X prevents you from tackling Y.
Keeping your cats indoors doesn't prevent society from protecting its children, elderly and everybody in-between. That sounds an awful lot like an excuse for not doing anything.
March 14th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Given dogs and to a lesser extent cats are domestic animals I'd hesitate to use the “natural” argument. As far as being psychologically disturbing I'm not so sure. When we lived in the city our cat (only had one then) had no desire to go outside and even now the declawed one does not want to go out. Of course one can argue being declawed psychologically damaged the cat. That may be the case but that is the way we got her so have to live with it.
Here in rural NH cats have predators (cars mainly from our experience) but on balance they are the predators. We let ours out but I am sensitive to the argument David makes.
As an aside the book “The World Without Us” has interesting observations about how various species will fare if humans were no longer around.
March 14th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
“What are they injuring badly but not capturing for you to see?”
That is a valid concern, if she doesn't bring kill home have no idea what is being killed. She does not seem to wander too far from home. Whenever one of us is outside she magically appears soon after.
March 14th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
My comment was not that keeping your cats indoors didn't prevent society from protecting the helpless, but that perhaps our priorities are skewed, and that our concerns should not really be about letting our animals out of doors but in taking care of all of those who are vulnerable. I personally have never met an indoor cat, that wouldn't rather (or so it seems) be outdoors. Maybe the real issue is that how can they miss the outdoors if they never experience it .The indoor cats I have known, spend inordinate hours staring out the window, trying to get out the door and playing at hunting. Our neighborhood regularly loses cats to fishers, and my cat fought off a fox in our breezeway, so I think it's dependant on where you live as to who is the predator.
I regularly feed birds, and let my cat out and I honestly do not have either rodent or bird corpses on my property. Since the fox, I make sure she is in at night. While I didn't mean it as an argument, natural predators are necessary, no matter how much we love the birds or rodents that live with us. Hunters of all kinds, usually seek out the young, the weak or the sick. As for domestication, both dogs and cats still have natural instincts that domestication cannot domesticate. My intent was not to start arguments, simply my point of view and no one needs to agree.