Should Cats Be Allowed to Roam?
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Where intellectual honesty gets witness protection from social prosecution. The Last Show with David Cooper.
Letting your cat roam free or keeping it indoors, it's one of those topics that turns otherwise normal people into very passionate animal philosophers. Freedom versus safety, nature versus nurture. But according to new research, maybe the answer is don't let your cat out at all, at least not until you hear what ecology and conservation scientist at Auburn University, Chris Lepchek, has to say. Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, David. Great to be here. My goodness, when you put out research on keeping cats indoors, you must get hate mail. You must get people that are very passionate.
Very much at times we do. And especially if it conflicts with their worldview.
I get the argument if you like live on a farm and you've got working cats who are kind of hired to mouths and instead of paying them cash you pay them cat food like I get it but cities are they a safe place for a cat to be out are we basically bad pet owners if we let our cats roam in environments where there's cars where there's coyotes where there's other cats that could beat it up where there's raccoons that could give it diseases like is this a good idea
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.
What are the risks of letting your cat roam outdoors?
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.
Poor kitties. Is there anything in your research digging into what cats do when they're let out, whether it's an urban environment, a suburban environment, even a rural environment? And you sort of thought, wow, I did not expect to see so much of that.
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.
The ones where the cats get into fights with the other neighborhood cats and people think their cats are so friendly and they realize their cat is the neighborhood jerk. Those videos are very funny.
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. Their activity times are not when we're out looking. So, you know, cats move pretty widely. They engage a lot of other animals in ways that we don't always think, including other cats.
And we found a lot of information, you know, over the years now with cats eating just a wide variety of different animals or cats. Killing those animals, but not necessarily eating them just from putting cameras on.
Cats are tiny murderers. They are loving. They are affectionate. They are man's best friend. Forget dogs. But they do like to murder rodents and birds and stuff. It's in their DNA. We always hear about cats as like these graceful little self-sufficient ninjas who can take care of themselves.
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