#keep your cats inside
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Gonna get on my soapbox because im so mad.
KEEP YOUR CATS INSIDE.
cw: animal death
Remember that cute little skunk I got pics of. Well we bought traps and were about to set them up to get him to a rehabber we know since it seems his mother was hit by a car.
We just learned that the neighbors cat killed them yesterday.
The fact that a whole family of animals was wiped out by human encroachment just deeply upsets me. Sure skunks arent endangered but that doesnt make them less worthy of protection (not to mention we DO have endangered animals in this area. One is a rodent, so easy cat target)
Please, learn how to properly care for you cat. They do not need to go outside. No I dont care that your cat 'wants out'. My cat is a rescue and he also wanted out at first. He got over it. It didnt take that long.
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i'll tell you what converted me to being all-in on keeping cats indoors only:
living for a year and a half in a rural area with a sudden feral cat colony explosion on the property.
i moved in with my folks for a bit and at that time, one (1) stray cat mama had taken up residence on the property, but was too feral to let my mother anywhere near her. but especially after she brought three kittens around, mom fed her and the kittens in hopes they'd grow trusting enough she could catch for spay and neuter at the minimum. momcat stayed mean and hella wary, but the kittens would hang around a little nearer and play with my mom via long stick, but still wouldn't come close enough to touch or catch.
unfortunately, two of the three kittens were girls and started having kittens of their own before further progress was made, shortly after i moved in. and that was pretty much instant doom.
there were so many kittens. SO MANY. multiple litters. every time we turned around, more kittens.
we fed them. we hunted for and located the kittens every time anywhere on the property and would move them to a repurposed doghouse anytime a mama cat had them somewhere else, so that they could grow up human-socialized and we could spay/neuter them when they were old enough. (also it was a handy tactic to push the issue of the mamas getting more used to/trusting of us themselves. only really worked with one of them, though.)
and we watched them die.
we watched litter after litter of kittens never make it to the age they could be spayed or neutered. the moms stayed, for the longest time, too skittish to more than briefly touch, much less catch and crate for a vet visit.
it sounds like a silly joke to say i have kitten-related ptsd, but i absolutely do.
too many goddamn times i'd walk out of the garage and find the carport and gravel drive strewn with tiny bodies. others simply went missing, never to be found.
one in particular, i wish i hadn't found, and the visual literally haunts me still, almost a decade later.
i saw so many kittens die of snake bite, spider bite, wild dogs, birds of prey, hit by cars, respiratory illness, covered in fleas and eyes crusted with infection.
and we loved them all. scrimped for antibiotics if the vet could be convinced to give it to us despite our being unable to bring them in. bought flea collars and ointments. we cared for them and fed them and petted them and played with them, brushed their fur and cleaned up their little faces, put ice in their water in hot summer, rigged a heating lamp in their house in the winter.
and they died. horribly. that property is pocked with unmarked graves of kittens and cats.
all the best intentions, not enough resources, and it didn't matter anyways because the population went from three to almost twenty (at times, over thirty) in the blink of an eye.
they died and died and died. our hearts broke over and over again. the stress and anxiety wore us down like sandpaper. i think, by the end of it all, we managed to find less than 10 of them all homes, including batman the disabled kitten i found a home across the country through tumblr.
it was carnage and tragedy, frankly. and we were helpless.
it only ended because they started dying faster than they could be born, and because we finally caught the two remaining mom cats in traps and got them spayed.
the points about outdoor cats being invasive predators devastating to local wildlife populations is true and valid and important.
but i know cat people, and cat people who don't know better than to let cats outdoors. what matters to you is the cat itself, generally. the cat being happy and taken care of.
keeping cats outdoors, letting them outdoors, is not taking care of the cats. it's not protecting them. it's not giving them any happiness or invigoration that couldn't be provided to them as indoor-only pets with just a little research and effort.
they die. they get ill. they get hurt. they're at risk of predators, and cars, and disease, and carelessly cruel children and deliberately cruel adults. they're at risk of disappearing on you because someone else saw a cat outdoors and intervened to give it a better, safer life not in conflict with the local environment.
and if that offends and angers you that someone would just take a cat they saw roaming outdoors, even collared, and that it sounds like i'm endorsing that, i am, but not if you intervene and be that person yourself for your own cat.
if what matters to you is doing right by your cat because it's family and a living creature whose happiness and health and safety is important to you,
keep them indoors. not part time. always. exclusively.
edit: since apparently i need to clarify this, i'm saying cats should live inside, that they should not live outdoors, even part time. visiting the outdoors supervised on a leash or in an enclosed catio is not the same as even part-time living outside, and i am certainly not advocating against it.
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My mom has this awful friend, Cynthia. My loathing goes deep enough that I’m not even going to change her name. If she ever finds this she knows what she did.
On multiple occasions my mom asked this horrible irresponsible chicken brained woman to watch after our animals while we were away. I don’t know why once wasn’t enough, because the first failure was so spectacular that anyone in their right mind would know she couldn’t be trusted with any level of responsibility or direction following.
You might be thinking to yourself, FFS, this level of antipathy is surely unwarranted! But you’d be wrong.
To set the scene, we were living in downstairs of our house when I was about fifteen. My mom has always wanted more animals than can reasonably be kept indoors which is how we ended up with three cats. When she wanted to kick them all outside I protested, and so all three cats lived in my bedroom with no access to the rest of the house.
That really wasn’t great, so in an attempt to give them options we made a window cutout with a cat door in it to give them access to the outdoors. Looking back on this as an environmentally conscious adult it’s wretched, cats should be indoor only, but at the time I was desperate to give them some freedom because one bedroom is too small for three cats.
So my parents and I went on a week long trip to visit family out of state. We told Cynthia to come feed and water the cats, and to scoop the litter box. Most importantly, don’t lock the handle of the door, because we only have the key to the deadbolt.
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Cynthia locked us out. We arrived home after 12 hours on the road, desperate for the comfort of our own beds. We were met with an unyielding door. With a sigh I volunteered, “I can punch in the cat door and climb in the window.”
I slipped behind the bamboo outside my window and pushed in the cutout. A horrible insidious reek wafted out at me. I paused, prickling with foreboding. But I had a job to do, and by god I’d see it through. I hefted myself up into the window and my hand immediately landed in something wet.
Skin crawling, I pulled myself up and surveyed the darkened room as a miserable odor of decay and suffering poured out of the room around me. I could see dark shapes littering the carpet and it didn’t take a genius to guess that the cats had taken up hunting in a big way during my absence.
I pulled my hand out of the pile of vomit it had landed in and dropped into my onetime bedroom turned now into a hellpit of decomposing wretchedness. I turned on the light. I wished I had not turned on the light.
My eyes scanned across the floor, tallying as they went. Two dead birds, a dead baby rabbit, five dead mice, and one dead snake. I paused on my alarm clock, perplexed to see a stain of white on it. I stepped closer and saw a furtive movement.
The tally suddenly contained also: one live bird that had shit in several places, probably in pure terror to find itself trapped in a room littered with decomposing woodland creatures, which honestly, fair. I coaxed it out the window and finished the survey with five discrete piles of vomit.
I unlocked the door and let my parents in. They exclaimed in disgust at the horrible smell. We stood together in my doorway floored by the magnitude of neglect. The unscooped litter box was a subtle footnote in the tangible reek my living space. I disposed of the parade of ecological disaster, cleaned vomit, and scooped the box after a brutally long day on the road. The cats were fine, and happy to see me. They had a huge dish or food and water so Cynthia’s neglect at least hadn’t harmed them.
Then I slept on the couch while my bedroom aired out, the windows flung wide to dispel the uneasy ghosts of the hunted. I spent the whole night cursing Cynthia’s name for this evil she’d visited upon me. When my mom asked her, "Cynthia, didn't you see the dead animals?"
Cynthia responded, "Yes, they smelled so bad, I just ran in and out as fast as I could." I fully don't believe she did any caretaking, and I'm personally of the opinion that she locked herself out on the first day and never came back.
The next day my room had returned to a habitable level of smellscape and I gratefully crawled into my bed that night. I stretched out and froze as my foot brushed something cold and wet?
The final indignity: one last dead snake, inside my very sheets.
Fucking Cynthia.
#ramblies#story#ffs foibles#keep your cats inside#but also looking back like why didn't I change my sheets#I did not have good bed hygiene instilled in me from my parents#later that lady would go on to leave a huge metal dish of dog food in the middle of the yard#despite the fact that we told her over and over not to feed the dog because he was on a diet#and I knew not to trust her so my friend was coming twice a day to feed him his portioned out meals#he gained like ten pounds in the week we were gone eating rained on mushy dog food#that fucking woman was a menace
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I mean, another great argument for keeping your cats indoors is so they don't get eaten by working line giraffes whose high prey drive hasn't been sufficiently channeled into their occupational routine.
#outdoor cats#giraffes#humor#don't take this seriously#except the outdoor cats part#keep your cats inside#that way they don't get hit by cars#or stolen by unscrupulous people#or wander into a schutzgiraffe trial
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🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛
🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤🐈⬛🖤
After a brief intermission here are more old moodboards
Goth Lesbians and Black Cats
PSA: watch out for any local or stray or outdoor black cats in this spooky month because many humans are monsters who will hurt them for absolutely no fucking reason.
#keep your cats inside#wlw aesthetic#goth wlw#gothic aesthetic#goth aesthetic#gothic#goth#cats#black cats#vi's moodboard
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wdym don’t let ur cats outside??
Domestic cats allowed outside have incredibly harmful impact on local ecosystems and have even been studied to cause generations of alteration to natural fauna patterns as they begin to fear and avoid feline predation or be killed off by cats transmitting diseases. They’re one of the few animals known to kill for fun not just as a food source and they don’t bring home a majority of their kills, even accounting for cats with collar bells. They are personally held majority responsible for the extinction of many kinds of small bird, mammals, and lizards in the areas they aren’t native to. Which is nowhere, because they are a domesticated animal
Also they get injured by dogs or other cats, hit by cars, poisoned, or attacked by bigger predators. If you wouldn’t let your dog out without a lead and supervision, your cat shouldn’t either. They’re perfectly happy indoors or in catios/escape proof gardens, just like you would with a dog.
They’ve also killed a couple of my pond fish, even after we put up predator netting. There’s nothing quite like having to scrape parts of your dead pet out of the grass cause a cat ripped up your net and managed to catch them, then not even eat the entire fish. The foxes at least are wild native animals trying to eat, cats are a people problem.
Also personally as someone who loves cats! But lives in an area with a lot of roaming cats, the screaming keeps me up some nights, and walking my dog means having her muzzled because she will damn near break my arm trying to get to and kill a cat with her prey drive. She’s already reactive and we take so many steps back training when a cat darts out on us. It’s my job to keep her in control and I do, but it’s just not great.
So yeah, I know it’s an old attitude ESPECIALLY in the U.K. and Europe bc it’s been around so long, but all the science indicates it’s bad for the environment, and the cats themselves. It can be hard to train out of older cats, but kittens who haven’t been out don’t miss it.
#this is a weird soap box issue I have so I wanted to use clear sources not just sound like some know it all#asks#Niamh’s tag#tw animal death#tw pet death#I love cats let me be clear! this isn’t a ‘fuck cats’ issue#and I realise it’s not a realistic change for everyone#nor do I have a cat so I’m not gonna sit here and try to convince people#but the evidence is there#keep your cats inside
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With the amount of stories I’ve heard of outside cats walking into someone’s house and never leaving, I don’t think cats want to be outside as much as y’all pretend they do.
#anti outdoor cats#keep your cats inside#I literally have two ‘outdoor’ cats tryingto come into my house when they have ‘owners’ every day#they clearly want to be inside
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Dead cat. Judging by the decomposition and partial freeze drying, this cat died around when it was below zero.
I recognize the cat, it was one of those dumb cats that sits out in the open and waits until the last second to run. Not at all surprised it died. Despite being an idiot, this cat didn't deserve to die here like this.
Keep your fucking cats inside.
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how am i still seeing ppl arguing about whether or not cats should be allowed to wander outside in this day and age? i thought it was universally agreed upon like 10 years ago that its bad to let your cats outside
#pasteltalks#and the ppl arguing for letting cats outside literally make the stupidest arguments#'well we dont keep children trapped inside just cause they could get hurt so why should we keep cats inside'#literally shut the fuck up#like thats such a stupid arguement#like we also dont let our kids just shit in a box in a corner now do we#or feed them on the ground#keep your cats inside#for both their safety#and the safety of the native ecosystem#discourse
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The thing that makes me really bitter about outdoor cats is that it makes it a million times harder to find a lost pet who got loose because everyone just assumes that any cat they see is meant to be outside so they never get reported.
There's also no real sympathy from pro-indoor cat people when it comes to lost pets. Maybe that cat who got mauled by a dog or hit by a car wasn't the neglected pet of someone who doesn't feel like scooping the litter box, maybe it was a very dearly loved indoor cat who slipped out the door or squeezed itself through a ripped window screen.
#i had a feral rescue who was strictly indoors only#and he escaped through a ripped window screen ONCE#and we found him by the side of the road the next morning#just. have more sympathy for people please.#hush and shush#keep your cats inside
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Shout out to this really photogenic cat I met a week ago. No clue who her owner was, she seemed friendly enough even if she ran away when I tried to help her.
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*whispers* outdoor cats in the UK are just as harmful to the environment as outdoor cats in the US.
#it’s late and I’m tired so I can’t get sources right now#but being in the uk doesn’t mean you should ignore all the anti outdoor cat posts#there’s a lot of issues with outdoor cats there too#one of which is the tragedy of the Scottish wild cat :(#they’re suffering because of domestic cats#also there’s still dangers to cats in the uk#like cars and people and dogs#I’m not sure what all predators are common there#but still there’s a lot of general dangers that apply anywhere#keep your cats inside
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If your outdoor cat goes missing or gets eaten by an owl or hit by a car or poisoned from eating the wrong thing or killed by the neighbor's dog, that's your fault. You're a bad pet owner, and you get to live with that knowledge.
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It's certainly something to see cat owners get really bent out of shape at the suggestion they keep their cats inside or only let them outside under supervision in spite of the copious amount of evidence that living outside vastly shortens their lifespans and that they are a danger to the ecosystem.
For example, a pair of husky owners filmed a "we're [group of people], so of course [statements]" video for fun. One of them said "of course, we're going suggest you keep your cats inside." A commentor echoed this and a couple of cat owners got very upset about it, going on about how people need to train their dogs better so on.
The fact of the matter is that there is only so much you can train a dog out of their natural prey drive, especially dogs who've been bred for centuries for the purpose of hunting. My own dog has too high of a prey drive to be trusted around other animals. She was clearly never socialized around other animals as a puppy and she enjoys the thrill of sniffing and hunting too much. However, while some owners do think they're above such things, leash laws exist for good reason. The best some owners can do is train them to focus on them during walks instead of the thing they instinctually want to chase and keep their dog on a leash... However, all that training will amount to jack should a neighbor's outdoor cat get into the backyard while the dog is out and I'm sorry but it is not the dog owner's fault if their dog attacks a cat intruding on their yard. Also... Should the fenced dog get injured by a loose cat in a fight, the cat's owner should be held liable for any vet bills.
Keep your cats inside or leash train them, stop leaving their safety up to other people.
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Also seriously. Keep your cats inside.
#Cats are an invasive species#They decimate bird populations#Letting them outside increases the risk they’ll get sick or hit by a car#Keep your cats inside
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