To keep the cat inside?

[GirlofInkandStars]

Dcat is currently being kept indoors. This is due to the bird nesting season and her being extremely prey driven and an enthusiastic tree climber. She is going to be in for a few months. It’s our first year with her as we only adopted her last summer.

Our garden has trees all around the perimeter and it’s just not possible to cat proof it all. She has the run of most of a largish 5 bed house and a catio which is about 3.5 x2.5m but she is very fed up with us. Please can can I heave some tips to help her adjust and some moral support that we are doing a necessary thing?

Honestly it’s so funny. Mine used to look so disappointed in me, she knew the game was up , and that made us laugh even more.

i used to buy the original ones imported from USA at great cost. But they are literally just tubes of fluoro material with an edging made of reflective material. The edging helps it keep its structure. But you can just buy the material and stitch them so quickly. If I ran out, (cat would ditch them around the garden), I’d just make a quick one.

www.birdsbesafe.com/?srsltid=AfmBOooD2QFjrgjvfOcrlRi5UmhWYwB8yoZwk3hS1bXCh_HX8DR5-cM2

😂🤣 oh the looks on some of these cats faces...........the indignity 🙀😹

She will be fine. Mine is indoor cat, he knows what's out there, he has full run of the flat. Hes a perfect weight, fit and not frustrated.

SabrinaThwaite

We have a sparrowhawk hanging about taking our small birds. It’s not just cats that hunt.

Sparrowhawks are part of the natural ecosystem. Cats are a destructive human introduction. How can you not see the difference? The numbers of predator birds is kept in check by injury, disease, food availability and other factors, so there is a limit to how many other birds they can kill. That’s not the case with the vast number of pet cats who are cosseted by human owners.

We British like to think we are animal lovers but the truth is we are people who love to exploit animals for our comfort and pleasure and happy to destroy the natural environment in the process.

All our cats were indoor cats, we got them at 8 weeks old. They seem content they're head butting purr machines.

indoor cats need extra enrichment and also daily play time with them. Boxes, tunnels, balls, puzzle feeders. My girls favourite is ribbon tied to a stick and we run around the house.

One of my girls was an outdoor cat and was rescued at 9 months while pregnant. She’s been indoors only for 8 years now and is perfectly content. However similar to your catio has access to a netted balcony so can enjoy watching the outdoors.

As a cat owner with a cat who catches the odd bird I totally get your reasoning but cats need to be cats and be able to express natural behaviours which unfortunately includes hunting birds. If a cat has been used to going outside to keep it in for no reason is wrong and stressful for the cat. As for catios, these are nothing but cages.
Whether they said to to appease me or not I’m not sure, but I was speaking to someone from the RSPB who said cats will only get the weak ones.
As an aside, humans do more damage to the bird population than cats.

Let her be a cat. They’re not designed to live their lives locked up inside our houses.

How can any animal designed to run, hunt, roam and climb be content to spend their lives locked up inside an artificially heated house?

I just let mine roam, she has brought in mice a few times but never caught any birds. I wouldn't worry about the bird population, they will choose to nest in a wide area.

And yet I can guarantee that the sparrowhawk in my garden has caught a lot more birds than my cat.

Do you regularly eat the birds in your garden?

such a straw man argument, ffs.

As others have said, cats are one of the primary reasons for bird populations plummeting in the uk.

It’s cruel to keep an outdoor cat indoors for anything other than a very short period of time (Bonfire Night etc).

Mine is. He’s more of a stuffed animal than a cat though. He likes sitting in the garden with me, if I go inside, so does he. The windows and doors are open and he can go out but chooses not to
his attitude is “my Netflix shows, sofa and mum are inside, why go out?”
He’s perfectly happy

The meat industry to feed humans does incedible amount of damage to the environment, it’s extremely disingenuous to punish a cat for killing only the amount it eats and then go buy your plastic wrapped chicken from sainsburys.

She’s young, she needs to be outside. They can start to wee inappropriately if unhappy.

My cats live inside. The younger one went outside once or twice when she was a catten, the older one was feral for a year or two before he was adopted, and later roamed free during daylight hours for a few years more (was a great rabbiter).

They've been inside now for six years and are happy, active, friendly and safe from traffic.

And the birds are safe from them. A robin was foolish enough to fly in through a window once. It didn't last long, nor does the occasional mouse/vole/shrew that finds its was in through the old stone wall.

Cats are fine living indoors.

Boy cat always had to be kept inside June to October because he had a horrible response to something in the great outdoors and would be covered in bleeding lesions all summer. The vets never worked out the cause or an effective treatment and every summer involved repeat visits to them for topical treatments. That doesn't happen any more. Girl cat has never been to the vet since her post-spaying stitches were removed six years ago.

Our native bird population is actually being decimated due to loss of habitat, pollution, climate change and disease. Cats cannot be blamed for any of these things.

That’s great your cat doesn’t bring in birds. Ours does. Maybe some birds do nest in a wide area but I can already see at least a dozen nests being built in the trees around our garden (which Dcat normally climbs). DH comes from a country where it is the law for cats to be kept inside in Spring hence building a catio etc. Cats are a choice and part of the bigger human problem for wildlife and birds in particular. They are not natural -or there wouldn’t be 8m of them in the UK.

it has been a few days of her being in now and I can see she is starting to adjust. She is making the most of her new climbing frame in the catio - and is having lots of attention and playtime. She almost always has company in the house and lots of enrichment. She seems to be relaxed again and has stopped asking to go out and making a beeline for the door when it is opened.

Thank you to those who have given helpful advice about enrichment ideas.

This really depends where you are, these are the known death stats for my small area last year:

2 cats - one blue tit fledgling, one chaffinch, one goldfinch

birds of prey (sparrow hawk and buzzard are the most common there are others) - at least one birds a week over the summer season so let’s say 26 birds

flying in to my windows - 2 robins, 3 bluetits and 2 goldfinches.

Loads of things eat birds, not just cats. The herons that live on river behind my house are responsible for eating all the baby ducks and anyone whose daft enough to keep koi carp. Should we put the herons inside?
If the cat wants to go out, let the cat out. I do t believe we should keep animals in cages, even 5 bedroom cages. (Note - I have 2 cats. One chooses to stay indoors most of the time, the other one is out all night. They have access to a cat flap and are living their own best lives).