I was horrified to learn that street cats generally live no longer than two years.
I was also horrified to learn that our rescued street cat, who’d been allowed to go out after we’d adopted him, has caught FIV, an immune system disorder. We can’t let him out anymore b/c of it, and I wish we’d kept him inside the entire time we’ve had him.
Yeah, it’s absolutely shocking to me that people don’t keep their cats indoors, and that isn’t normalized.
My view is that if you’re not going to take responsibility for your pet’s whereabouts or even equip it with identification then it’s not really “your” pet in any meaningful sense (and thus cannot be stolen).
There’s a big difference between indoor/outdoor cats and street cats. Indoor/outdoor cats live much longer than 2 years.
That’s what microchipping is supposed to be for. But realistically, would someone who doesn’t care about an animal’s provenance care either way if a cat has a collar id or a microchip?
Looks aside, the best way to tell cats apart is their personality. If you don’t know your cat well enough to identify (in good times and stressful both) do you really know your cat?
I reside with five black DSH cats indoors and there are currently six black DSH in the strayby mix we help feed/fix outdoors. No issues telling them apart because we’ve known each other so long.
My parents have three tabby siblings- Henry (badass tiny wild grrrl) and her brothers Tommy and Thomas. I was going to say something about how long it took me to call the boys by the right name, but I just get hung up on what a missed opportunity it was to name them “Larry, Darrel, and Darrel”…
Sure: maybe five years, which is still fucking terrible. The cat’s life expectancy is at least halved. The fully-indoor cats I’ve known all lived to be 16+ years old… I don’t know any cats let outdoors that lived anything close to that. Being hit by cars is a major cause of cat deaths (not to mention dogs, predators, falls, etc.), which is completely avoidable by keeping cats indoors.
Seeing a similar cat outside and thinking our cat had escaped, we had a house sitter bring in a neighbors cat that looks similar enough to ours one time while we were travelling. The neighbor cat was (understandably) not having any of it. When she got inside and saw our cat sitting there, a brief
ensued, and then neighbor(hood) cat promptly scrambled back into the wilds of my street.
I guess my cat would have lived to be at least 42 if kept indoors, if that math is correct
my indoor/outdoor cat had a p-value less than .00001 apparently
Now wondering why she doesn’t have 74 cats. Or does she.
More time to destroy local biodiversity!
Then your cat was legion.
Gawd, I haven’t watched anything by Cyriak in ages.
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