Chris Lepczyk

anthropomorphize the aspects that we think are human aspects when that's not maybe at all what an animal is doing.

The view of welfare and what is great for an animal differs a lot around the world, but I would say that animals like cats can live wonderful lives indoors.

And a lot of it's how engaged you as the owner

Um, wants to be with that animal.

And so, you know, you can enrich your home environment, um, putting up things like cat trees, playing with toys with them, providing opportunities to interact with you and having places to hide.

But there's ways to give them some outdoor experience that mimics things that they would have an opportunity to do.

So a lot, a really popular approach now is using catios.

So attaching essentially, you know, like a screen porch or a screen to your house.

There are people that walk cats on a leash just like they do with a dog.

You know, you can get a cat backpack.

So my daughter has a cat backpack.

Right, just like you can walk around with a cat on your back and...

so the idea of having there's no way to have them have outdoor exposure i mean that's not really something that's true they can have outdoor exposure in those kinds of controlled methods uh you know i think any animal when you release it fully outdoors i mean even if you're walking a dog you expose it to certain risks that you can't fully control and just like us there are diseases in the environment there's um weather environmental factors

So you're always going to have a small amount of kind of factors that play in.

But I would say that a cat can live a wonderful life indoors and how much you want to engage in.

Yeah.

And I think the other thing is if it's not something you can do with the cat you own now, what about the next cat?

So we have to think about lots of changes taking time.

And many people do have cats that they have rescued or it would be difficult to have as indoor pets.

But that doesn't mean that has to be in perpetuity.