My cat thought he could win a fight with a raccoon.
Every time the neighbourhood raccoons ambled across the back deck – most often this was a mother raccoon trailed by three kits – Dax would bolt upright, spring up from his resting place, and launch himself at the nearest window or the patio door.
He was a good-sized cat, and standing on his hind legs, whacking the window with his paws, he did startle the raccoons.
However, if I had let him out, the fight would not have gone his way. Which is one reason why Dax was an indoor cat for the whole of his comfortable life.
If you have an indoor cat, you know the other reasons for that choice. Coyotes, opossums, not to mention dogs. Cars will take a worse toll on outdoor cats than anything else.
Then there’s the consideration of the toll cats take on their environment. Dax never got tired of pouncing on things – toys, random bits of paper, occasionally unguarded toes – and if he’d been let out, he would have tried to kill every bird and rodent he laid his eyes on.
There are ways to let cats spend time outside without worrying that they’re going to come to harm – enclosed catios, with leads and harness, or with close supervision in a small yard.
But opening the back door and just letting cats roam freely is a recipe for disaster, both for local wildlife and for the cats themselves.
Every municipality in Metro Vancouver – and across the country – should ban free-roaming outdoor cats.
The numbers back this up.
Cats are estimated to kill 100 million birds a year in Canada alone.
But the world also takes a toll on cats. Various studies have estimated different ranges, but the more outdoor access cats have, the shorter their lives. One study suggested they died two years earlier, on average, while another found that they only lived half as long as indoor cats.
Mandating a ban on free-roaming outdoor cats would be a huge cultural change. It would take a long time to bring many cat owners around and be hard to enforce. And having an indoor-only cat demands more of their owners – you have a responsibility to make sure your cat has plenty of play and exercise inside the house.
But it would be beneficial. Cats would live longer. Birds would become more common in urban and suburban areas. It would help reduce feral cat colony populations.
And it’s far from the first time we’ve done this. It wasn’t that long ago that people let their dogs wander the neighbourhood. This resulted in dog attacks on people and livestock, not to mention many dogs dead from being hit by cars. We changed the rules, and we changed how people behaved. It can be done.
