Yep. It's a risk I take letting them out and having the freedoms they are used to. They'd have a shit life being locked in the house when they are used to being out. Even my elderly black cat likes his hour outside a day.
Fair enough - I was mainly asking that of OP, who sounds somewhat entitled to me; but you obviously have a more realistic perspective.
Wtf? My cat was attacked and killed by an out of control dog right outside my old house. Was the onus not on the owner of that dog to keep it under control?
If it had happened in a private garden then it's an unfortunate accident imo, but it happened on the street outside my house. I caught it on my CCTV. The dog owner had a legal responsibility to keep their dogs under control. That's the law.
I don't see how you can compare a cat pooping in your garden to a cat being mauled by a dog, and simply see it as fair enough.... One is annoying but can be prevented with deterants; the other causes extreme suffering to both animal and human due to the failure of an owner to act responsibly. The devastation of losing our beloved pet in such a traumatic way was untold... I needed counselling to deal with what had happened and we had to move houses because it served as a constant reminder. Pretty sure nobody has ever needed counselling because a cat shat on their garden but it's Mumsnet so you never know!
I think you misunderstood me. Of course the dog owner should have had their dog under control, but if you hadn't left your cat to roam free, it wouldn't have happened either. What if it had been another, bigger cat that had attacked and killed or seriously injured yours? Should the other cat owner have controlled their cat but you shouldn't control yours?
But regardless of that, I was not saying that cats deserved to be attacked or killed as punishment for pooing in people's gardens; just that the same attitude that lets them roam around freely to poo and kill birds and rodents wherever they like is the same attitude that must by rights also accept that they can get into danger.
If you let your small child play out in the road, it could very easily end in tragedy - whether the driver was horrendously careless or couldn't possibly have prevented it, but people (usually) care about and take responsibility for their children, to ensure that it won't happen.
Either your potentially-vulnerable charge is allowed to roam free and face risk or is always supervised and thus kept safe. As I said, you can't have it both ways.