Cat owner and avid environmentalist here: totally agree. I’ve always kept my cats inside for the obvious environmental reasons, but ask any vet and they’ll tell you that indoor cats lead much longer, healthier lives.

We need to start treating dogs and cats the same way - if there’s a cat around without it’s owner and it’s not leashed, it goes to the pound. $250 fee to retrieve your cat to pay for boarding and also donate to the pound that receives them. If people had to pay $250 and drive all the way to the pound to pick up their cat every time they let them out, I can tell you that outdoor cat owners will go one of two ways: they’ll either stop owning cats (big win) or they’ll keep them inside (also big win).

Indoor cats live longer, healthier lives. And they can even be harness-trained to be able to enjoy going outside on walkies!

Cats are one of the most adaptive species on this planet. All of their needs can be met inside. Inside cats in Australia have a better quality of life than a lot of humans do around the world.

When I adopted my cats the shelter and foster people asked if the cats will stay inside or go outside and when I said inside they all made a sigh of releave and the shelter workers said "thank god, thats definitely the best for them". I build them a small cage that I put up at the window in my old flat, now I have a balcony where they can roam and when I live in a house with a garden at some point they will get a big catio.

I think that them being able to safely go outside a little bit is important, the outside world gives them so much different experiences. Wind, fresh air, outside noices, smells from neighbors barbecuing. But yeah, leaving them completely outside is not good

Live in NZ. My kitten is, and will always be an indoors cat. When i finally get to a larger house she'll have a lovely catio.

Cat owner here too. One of my cats is a pure-breed Maine Coon, the other is a domestic mid/long hair. They have never ever been outdoors cats (well, the latter was a stray so I guess she was?) but they're indoors kitties now. No issues at all, they have no interest to go outside. They are happy and content. I support indoors-only cats, and this is from someone who lives in a shoebox apartment.

CSIRO should either (a) generically engineer a cat that doesn’t function as an ambush predator (making them congenitally short-sighted could help, though iridescent fur that prey see from a mile away would also make them more appealing as pets), or (b) work on creating domesticable variants of sufficiently catlike native marsupials to replace cats as pets

I am not here to make the case that cats should be kept indoors for the sake of local wildlife – that case has been made over and over and over >and over again. Cat owners know these arguments, and if they have not been persuaded by the fact that cats kill more than 6 million native >animals in Australia a day they will not be persuaded by me.

I'm here to tell you, most people are idiots that don't read.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Most days, when the sun hits that part of the floorboards, our cat Laurie can be found there, lazing in a sunbeam watching the birds through the glass.

The Invasive Species Council responded by calling on the New South Wales government to introduce laws requiring that cats be kept indoors.

She escaped a few times when she was younger, usually making it no more than one body length from the door before freezing in terror at the overwhelming vastness of the outdoors.

Once, when we were visiting my parents’ farm, I clipped her into a harness with the expectation that she would enjoy exploring the yard, but she flattened her robust body to the ground and refused to move.

There was a moment, in our first winter in this house, when we woke to the sound of rats chewing the ceiling, then I wished my old cat Elmo was still alive.

If Nugget hadn’t lost the leg and decided to stick closer to home, I doubt she would have lived past five.

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