Chris Lepczyk

The next time you get a cat, could you have an indoor cat?

Probably.

Very much at times we do.

And especially if it conflicts with their worldview.

Yeah, I mean, I think just from an animal welfare perspective, there's a lot of risk of having a cat being outdoors in a city.

You know, it's not, it's far less we worry about some of the things that maybe we talk about in the past, like what they could do to birds or small mammals.

But there's great risk between the possibility of being hit by a car.

acquiring a disease, just even accidental things like falling off of a tree or a building.

There's lots of reports of incidences that we don't really think are kind of what cats are doing day to day, but the animal welfare and vet med records really show that

You know, the cats are doing what cats do.

And as a result, they run into a lot of risky behavior.

And it's either severe trauma, which costs a lot of money, or, you know, it results in the loss of a cat.

And, you know, even to give you an example here in Auburn, we have a lot of coyotes and many cats are just a loss to the coyotes that live in the city.

I mean, I think there's really great camera studies where people both in the U.S.

and then in places like New Zealand and Australia have put small cameras on cats and watched where they go.

Yeah.

And, and, you know, just sometimes they go further than we think, um, you know, so they can travel far, a lot farther than just your yard or the next yard over.

Some cats really don't move that far.

Um, you know, we're finding this out about all animals now that we can really track where they are in the environment.

They just, they go places we did not really understand because many animals don't spend their time out in the open saying, Hey, come find us right there trying to be sneaky or they're going to go where it's shady or whatever.