#two of them got snatched up by coyotes and one drowned in the pool

[swannkings]

not even just the ecological damage:

have you ever watched a roaming cat rapidly waste away from an incurable virus? have you ever had to pull somebody else’s pet from beneath your car where they died on the hard concrete and not in a warm home where they were loved? have you ever seen a cat show up in your yard wounded and dripping blood because yours was the closest place to safely rest?

buy an air cleaner and a couple of cat trees or don’t have a cat in the first place. if you can’t or don’t want to spend time with them, then don’t have them at all. save yourself the money, your neighbors the trouble, and those little creatures from hard, short lives, and terrible, painful deaths.

Does it seem weird that people treat cats like they’re wild animals to anyone else? And by that I don’t mean people expect cats to survive on their own in the wild. I mean people act like pet cats who have owners are wild animals that the owners aren’t responsible for.

I never thought about that until a few years ago when someone in the town Facebook group asked who owned a cat that kept jumping in through his windows. It was summer so he couldn’t keep his windows closed (we don’t use air conditioning in this country) and he had a terrible allergy to cats so it was legit dangerous for him to have a cat running around his house.

People started offering solutions like “buy this spray that deters cats” and “you can buy this rolling thing for the top of your fence” but his response was “Okay but why am I expected to spend all this money to keep someone’s pet out? Who owns this cat!?” When he didn’t get an answer he eventually got a friend to pick the cat up when it was in his house and he drove it to a shelter, and informed the Facebook group which shelter. Suddenly the owner responded, angry that he’d do such a thing! Getting the cat back would cost money! But the guy was like where the fuck were you when I asked who the cat belonged to!? I was trying to avoid this!

I was honestly surprised by how many people were on the side of the cat’s owner. Another cat owner on our street isn’t responsible enough to keep her cat indoors but responsible enough to at least buy stuff for other people if her cats bother them. She practically have a small stach of cat deterrent spray she hands out to the neighbors who doesn’t want cats in their garden.

The whole thing really made me realize how strange it is that cats are the only pets where we expect other people to spend their money on building fences to keep them out instead of the owners trying to keep them in, as if they were wild animals with no owner to look after them.