Take your cats in

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

There's been a population explosion of rats around Davis Square, and if your landlord is anything like mine, they'll ignore your pleas to hire a professional exterminator and just start throwing poison around. You don't want your cat eating a poisoned rat.

Comments

[alphacygni]

Construction projects are also obligated to do "pest control", and they all do it with those poison traps. And if your part of Davis is anything like mine you've probably got two or three major construction projects on your block. Last summer I kept finding untouched dead mice all over the backyard. My cats, thankfully, have no desire to go outside, so I don't even have to disappoint them. Because I absolutely would keep them inside, for that and other reasons.

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. I'm in Bob Trane's ward (sayonara, Condo Bob) and we've got - guess what - more luxury condos going up.

The upstairs neighbor saw a redtail eat one of the rats today. Bye-bye, redtail. The landlord is shooting himself in the foot by trying to cut corners, because with no predators, they'll just come back tenfold in the spring. But he doesn't have to live here...

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Ugh... and it's not likely that anything else works on construction sites. You can't "ratproof" a construction site, which is the most effective way to get rats out of a building.

[keithn.livejournal.com]

There were about 5.4 million cats killed by cars in 2001 [1], the last year I could find an estimate, out of roughly 46 million owned outdoor cats and 55 million feral cats [2]. If these numbers are accurate, this would mean 5.3% of outdoor cats are killed by cars each year, and an outdoor cat's chances of being killed by a car over a 10 year period would be 42%. This is just one of the many easy ways for a cat to die outdoors.

So perhaps poisoned rats are the least of your concerns if you let your cats roam the streets.

[1]: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Pets/PetCare/Cats/KeepingCatsSafe.htm
[2]: http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/cats/pdf/Loss_et_al_2013.pdf

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my cat roams from the armchair to the kitchen to the bedroom and back again, and the only wildlife he's ever eaten have been a few moths. People whine that cats are "really" wild animals and need their freedom, when in fact they're just too lazy to deal with a litterbox.

[gruene.livejournal.com]

It's a regional thing. Where I grew up, nearly everyone let their cats out. Here, nearly everyone keeps them in.

[squirrelitude]

On the other hand, nearly every indoor cat I've met has been neurotic, which I don't think is a coincidence. (The indoor/outdoor ones seem more sounds of mind.) So I think there's something to that claim, although how you feel that factors into the indoor/outdoor question depends on other variables.

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

??? You're saying that indoor cats are neurotic? Well, that's certainly a unique obseervation. I certainly can't corroborate it.

[squirrelitude]

The cat I grew up with had a very relaxed attiitude towards people. She would come over to say hi and get petted (whether or not you were a stranger), and wander off to go kill things or sleep. You could play with her if she felt like it. She'd pounce on your hands if you were gardening.

That's the general attitude I see in outdoor cats. Some are more skittish, some are more friendly. But then indoor cats... man, I don't know. They usually freak the hell out when they see someone new, they bite and scratch randomly while you're petting them...

Anyway, that's my experience. It's not a perfect correlation by any means, and I'm happy to agree that it might be a selection bias or something, but the general impression I have is that indoor cats are weird. *shrug*