If you love your cat, keep it indoors because:
- Cars kill millions of cats each year.
- Outdoor cats are exposed to serious and often fatal infectious diseases such as feline leukemia and rabies.
- Parasite such as fleas, ticks and intestinal worms pose a health threat to your cat. Some of these can be transmitted to humans.
- Cats outdoors are often chased by dogs or other cats, and killed, injured or hopelessly lost.
- Cats are often shot at, poisoned, trapped or tortured by neighbors annoyed by cats using their gardens as a litter box or hunting bids and other small animals.
- Coyotes, great-horned owls and other wild animals are known to regularly kill and eat house cats.
- Cats that spend time outdoors require more medical treatment and have significantly shorter life spans.
If you love your wildlife, keep your cat indoors because:
- 4-5 million birds are killed by cats each day.
- Collar Bells on cats don’t work because birds and other wildlife do not associate bells with being stalked.
- Ground-nesting birds are particularly susceptible to predation by cats.
- Cats will hunt small wild animals, despite how well fed they are.
- Almost all young birds leave the nest before they can fly well and spend a day or two on the ground. These fledglings are frequently caught by cats as they are learning to fly.
- Most of the birds caught by cats, but not killed outright, die of their injuries or infection.
- Cats that kill small rodents can eliminate a critical food source for owls and hawks.
Source: THE LINDSEY MUSEUM, Walnut Creek, CA