And what are we meant to do with the millions and millions of house cats out there already if we can’t either a) let them out into the wild, because of the destruction they’ll do to the environment or b) keep them in our houses, because that’s apparently cruel?
I do get your point, but we can’t undo the domestication of animals at this point. The feral cat population in most places is already out of control (as I’m sure you’re aware). What’s to be done with the cat population that already exists, given that they are domesticated animals?
I do have a cat, she’s an indoor cat, she’s fixed, we give her toys to play with (and play with her often), feed/water her, take her to the vet yearly for her shots, groom her, etc. We live in a sizable house and she’s the only critter there. Is it cruel to own her, or should we have her put down, or should we just open the door and let her go into the backyard (with all sorts of critters she can chase and coyotes who can chase her)? Keep in mind she’s always been an indoors cat. She seems perfectly content, but as you note, our human perspective can be very limiting (which I agree with you there - we can’t really understand our pets POVs and our ability to communicate with them is indeed limited).
I’m not trying to be snarky here, but I’m just wondering what the answer is to having pets in general, which you seem at least partial at odds with? Companion animals are not a new thing in human history. We’ve been domesticating animals for food, work, and companionship for a while now. At some level the cat is out of the bag on that. Just stopping having pets would have deeply unforeseen consequences that we can’t predict.
Not at all! You have a perspective here that we should talk about, I think.
I didn’t mean to imply i thought you meant anything more than generally, cats are lower maintenance. It just struck me when pointing out not all cats are low maintenance that i didn’t expect my high maintenance feline overlord to need so much care when I brought her home. But I’d made the commitment, so I owed her a duty to give her what she needs.
Having never had a high maintenance cat, I am curious what that entails. Our barn cat is an attention hog, but that is about what she wants, rather than what she needs.
This is gonna be long!
For her, it meant patiently trying food after food, different brands and types like wet vs dry vs raw to get her regurgitation down to less than twice a day. Part of her problem is she doesn’t chew and part is she has feline IBS. Had to find the food she wouldn’t puke up constantly and that didn’t cause painful constipation. I had to do it slowly, switching foods quickly with a cat can cause problems. This took years, slowly getting improvements with better foods until now she only pukes twice a week. Plus cleaning up the puke.
She also has either a spinal injury or congenital spinal defect (vets cant tell which) that didn’t show up until she grew, at 6 months. Her spinal cord is pinched, not too badly but enough that her back leg muscles slowly atrophied. She has very little muscle in her back legs, so she walks like a rabbit on her full foot instead of toes/ball like most cats. She also stumbles alot and drags her legs if she is on tile or wood. She can’t jump more than 9 inches, and that is her mostly pulling herself up with her strong front. She has trouble pooping sometimes, and her anal glands don’t empty properly (again, the spinal thing), so that has to done manually every so often. Sooooo pooping in the litter box is tough for her, she feels really unstable and, bc of her IBS, still associates the box with painful pooping (though that is pretty rare now). She poops just outside the boxes and every day I clean it up. Pees in the box fine, for which I am thankful.
I have soft pet stairs at each bed and a round, low scratching post by each couch so she can get up easily.
She has major food securties, even after 17 years of never letting her run out. Bowls cannot be empty and bucket can’t be almost empty. Otherwise, she freaks out. Follows you around the house yelling very loudly until you fix it.
She needs a lot of attention and can’t be left alone. Her companion kitties are invaluable, but she still needs at least an hour of cuddling every day, though she is quite content to sit in my lap or next to me while I read, play games, or watch tv. More makes her happier. One of her nicknames is velcro cat. Active petting, at least 45 min total and 3 times a day on weekdays, more on weekends. Yes, she knows when it’s the weekend. She can be left at home if we are away a few days, if we make it up to her. Any longer and she needs a person to come visit every other day.
Can’t bath her, ever. If she is messy, which is rare as she is very fastidious, we use no water furminator. She is so terrified of baths she will pee herself.
Plus the usual cat stuff, like nail trimming, brushing, occasional fur ball.
She’s an amazing cat. Often rather loud, trying to get your attention, but affectionate and sweet. Fantastically patient with children. Even when her tail and ears are pulled.
So not husky or herd dog level maintenance, but pretty high for a cat.
My neighbor had one when I bought my house. That dog was the most emotionally needy dog I’ve ever come across. I classified her as “high maintenance” for that reason alone.
Re: border collies - they most definitely will herd children if there’s more than one present, and they haven’t herded anything in a while.
Can we toss Siamese breeders into this vat, please? I love ours to death, but they were available for adoption at our local Humane Society because they weren’t “perfect” by breeding standards. One of 'em was literally tossed to the curb of a very busy road.
@anon23281680: You are a champion cat’s human. Your kitteh is far higher maintenance than any of the kitteh’s that have owned me over the last 25 years.
Can Confirm. Maggie and Moe would try herding small people constantly. They had no idea where they’re herding them TO but. ‘small screamy thing running around. it needs to understand it should stop doing that.’ Note. Maggie died of old age (sixteen and she was a trail dog on my stepdad’s horse rides) and Moe got re-homed to a nice family and last we checked he seemed quite content and happy.
Tik’s more of a ‘oh hey you’re running? I can run too. Can we play?’
That’s a question which can’t be properly answered, so it is a very good one.
In my personal opinion, much would be improved if all humans would realise that cats aren’t human. Since a tiny exaggeration might be helkpful to drive my point: while humans are not totally bad at abstract thinking, and empathy is often a good thing, pet (especially cat and dog) owners mostly think and act like a parent, not as a host to an alien species.
Starting from there, I would venture that all cats should be sterilised. Feral cats could also be culled; but NB I would have to dive into literature before even properly discussing this. (BTW, unpopular doesn’t even begin to describe such a drastic measure, does it?) I vaguely remember that some research also started to look into some sort of non-lethal poisoned baits (chemical sterilisation, I think?), which however weren’t specific enough of taken up by other animals.
Thank you. FTR, I was trying to get some readers to think. (Also FTR, I feel now that I can’t sustain a debate in a satisfying way. Got family over since some days. Definitely not low maintenance. Hope to be able to go link hunting soon, got some things in my mind, including some nuanced stuff on the approaches discussed in NZ.)
I once lived in a place where it was decided that the feral cats were negatively impacting the bird population. So the cats were trapped and killed. It turns out that the cats primarily served to control the rat population, which then exploded and decimated the birds.
That is not to say that cats do not have a negative impact at times. But nature is complicated. Sometimes the cats fill a niche that had previously been occupied by other small predators.
I try not to do this, especially since I’m an actual parent. The cat’s a cat. I don’t dress her up in little costumes or expect her not to chase around bugs, etc.
So, eventually, you want an end to domesticated cats entirely, am I reading you correctly (and yes, I can see how that’d be unpopular)? Why not do this with dogs, or cows, or sheep, or any other critters humans have domesticated for our benefit? Isn’t that just obliterating our responsibility, since these animals (much like various plants) were all shaped to benefit us? Granted, for the majority of us (@Max_Blancke excluded, I guess, since he seems to employ his cat at their traditional tasks - though my cat indeed keeps our scorpion population under control, it seems) we no longer employ domesticated animals for the purposes we domesticated them for… except as companions. What’s our moral responsibility after 10,000 or so years of purposeful domestication? Should we just cull the population now that we no longer find them to be entirely useful?
Some of this question is about how we’ve changed the world for our benefit, I suppose. It’s been centuries of changes we’ve made and I’m not sure we can just throw up our hands now that we’re not living directly off the land. It’s a different world now then it was even a couple of hundred years ago, but much like industrialization and colonization during that era, we can’t undo it. We can only try and move forward and make something more sustainable for all of us. I don’t think eliminating the cat population entirely would be a responsible move. Honestly, I think it begs the question whether or not animals have rights at all. Maybe they should have some protections since they are only what we’ve made them.
Again, thanks for asking some hard questions. I don’t think there are easy answers to these questions, but it’s good that we’re trying to think through it, despite that.
But I think we do need to also understand that modern domesticated animals are the way they are, partly because of how we, as human beings, have shaped them. It’s true that cats were domesticated a bit differently and are less shaped by their interactions with humans than dogs, but they’ve still been shaped by their relationship with humans. it’s not just nature at play here, but our shaping of nature for our benefit. I think it becomes a moral question about what our responsibility should be for domesticated animals in general.
I think we can breed larger housecats, but I don’t think we wish to be eaten. I think their size is a balance between ‘we need a killer animal’ and ‘small enough to not murder us in our sleep’.
But this is about their behavior, too, right? I mean one of the largest breed of cat is also the sweetest:
Hardly likely to attack you and the closest cat to a dog you can get. Big fluffy sweeties! Although the wikipedia says that they are a “natural” breed.
Hope to be able to go link hunting soon, got some things in my mind, including some nuanced stuff on the approaches discussed in NZ.)
