On a discussion forum I frequent, people are debating the merits of keeping cats as pets. A recent study apparently suggests that keeping cats indoors is bad for them, and that keeping them indoors doesn’t actually protect wildlife, either. 

It’s a very ethical discussion, full of the respect for all living things and the treatment of animals as sentient beings that is prevalent among well-educated middle-class white people these days. Some people are insisting that if you aren’t letting your cat outside, or at least enriching the heck out of its life, you shouldn’t have cats. Some people think you shouldn’t have pets, period. There are a lot of people asserting without evidence that most cat owners are cruel, neglectful, or selfish, and others saying their cats are just fine and everyone needs to get a grip.

I confess that my sedate, greedy, opinionated cat Louie lives entirely indoors. I live in the inner city, and he would be squashed by a car in an instant, if I managed to force him to go outside. An open door to the outside, to him, is a threat. I can only get him to play with a toy for perhaps five minutes before he walks away. I do feed him canned meat (so that he is better nourished and won’t get UTIs), I provide water (that he doesn’t drink), and he seems happy to have one large cat litter box to himself (instead of the one-per-cat plus one that is recommended). I tried constructing a place for him to enjoy the birds outside the window, and he refused to use it. 

What Louie apparently wants is to sleep, stretch, groom, eat, get lots of petting, lie next to me, bring me toys at night while wailing like the damned, and have a nice warm place to live.

The most important thing is, he’s alive. 

When he was eight years old, someone surrendered him to an animal shelter. He was a fat black-and-gray tabby cat,  terribly sad in his cage, and he wouldn’t eat or drink. He was probably going to die, and before he died, he was going to have an awful time in a dreadful place that was full of noise and the yells of other animals. 

I walked in, saw his big serious eyes, and took him home on the bus in a loaned carrier, which was uncomfortable for both of us, but I don’t have a car.

He’s a small, partly-domesticated predator, an animal that has been bred for centuries to hang around human beings, and unlike the raccoons and possums who also hang around human beings, and who live on the trash in my neighborhood, he’s bad at feeding himself in the wild. 

I’m not saying that’s true of all cats. I grew up when barn-cats were the norm. The barn-cats tore each other apart and then died of infection. They were eaten by foxes and savaged by loose dogs, and died of all the parasites and transmissible diseases cats are prone to. They starved to death, too.  When my mother was a child, what decent people did with a litter of kittens was drown them. 

Heck, I used to have indoor-outdoor cats when I lived in the suburbs. They certainly enjoyed the outdoors, though mostly they sat on the porch with their paws tucked. When they did range, it wasn’t good. One of them was hit by a fire engine and killed. Another just disappeared. A third was attacked by a neighbor tomcat, and had to have a drain put in his neck, because it got infected. 

Anyway, here we are with these creatures who just aren’t good at foraging, in a built-up world where they are likely to be hit by cars or used as bait for fighting dogs. 

And there are plenty of people who think of cats as vermin. One of my neighbors once confided to me he took a stray cat that had been begging for food, and threw it out on the highway. He was reassuring me, you see, that the cat had been taken care of, and that I didn’t need to bother my head about it.  

Louie would not do well on the highway, it goes without saying. And the next stray cat who came around begging for food, Sugar, ended up living in my house for the next twelve years. I didn’t mention her to my neighbor. Now that I think of it, I believe he’s dead, too. He was a drug dealer. Being a drug dealer can be as hard on life expectancy as being an outdoor cat.

We are sharing our imperfect lives with our imperfect animal friends. It is quite possible we are doing it wrong. I’m okay with that as a compromise.