Is it cruel to keep cats indoors?

Do you have an indoor or outdoor cat?  I've been getting some sense lately that people think me cruel because I don't let Buttercup outside.  Oh, she gets outside, all right, as she did when my husband opened the back door last night and she scooted past him.  So there I am at midnight in my robe and slippers, chasing her around the neighborhood (it took me half an hour to nab her -- she's wise to the ribbon-dangled-in-front-of-her trick, but she finally succumbed to treats).  The temperature was supposed to be in the 30's last night, so I couldn't leave her outside.  But I don't let her out in the morning to run around all day. 

 

Soooo innocent
(Linkup to This and That Thursday,  Camera Critters,  and Happiness Is . . . )

So here are the reasons I keep Buttercup indoors:

 1.  Outdoor cats get more diseases, such as Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, and I just read a very disturbing article somewhere (can't find it now) on toxoplasmosis and how it may be the culprit in many human health conditions.

2.  Things happen to outdoor cats -- fights, hit by cars, lost, etc. etc.  I don't want to take that risk.  Indoor cats as a group live much longer than outdoor cats (though I'm sure some of you all have outdoor cats that are 20 years old).  They also bring in fleas and stuff like that.

3.  We have an issue in our neighborhood with people complaining about cats running around and pooping in their yards and such.  I know this can't be our older outdoor cat because the first thing he does when we let him in is use the litter box -- with all that great outdoors out there, he chooses to poop at home.

4.  They can get into various kinds of trouble.  Our neighbor came over the other day to ask if October (the older outdoor cat) was okay, and when we asked why he shouldn't be, neighbor said that October came in through his cat door in the middle of the night and he and his wife awoke to the sounds of a cat fight going on in their bedroom!  Yikes!  Also, when Buttercup streaked out of the house another time and was gone for five hours, I finally found her on the other side of an 8' fence between us and a small housing development on the other side.  She can climb up on various things to get over there, but it's basically a blank wall on the other side, and she can't get back.

5.  All signs point to her being a mighty hunter.  She stalks anything she can stalk inside the house -- moths, toy mice, sponges, anything really, that she can flip into the air and chase.   I really, really don't want her out there killing birds, because I love them.

6.  She's white.  This is not so much an issue of her coming in dirty (though she hates to be bathed), but the vet warned us that white cats are very vulnerable to skin cancer, and where she was injured on the nose when she was very tiny (before we got her), there's very little fur, which makes her even more vulnerable.

So, unless it's a working cat who has a job keeping rodents down in the barn, I feel okay about keeping a cat indoors.  What do you think?  Am I Cruella de Ville?  :)

October

[Linkup to Simplicity]

No, not the month, the cat.  We have a very, very large cat named October.  I'm a dog person and a bird person (more on that another day) but not a cat person, so October and I have a somewhat wary relationship with one another.

I suppose he's a nice cat, as far as cats go, but I'm not sure that any cat could truly win my affections.  I think this goes back to childhood, and I can pin it on my dad, who hated cats with a passion and pretended to be allergic to them so he'd never have to see them, if he was at someone else's house.  (We always said "pretend," because if he didn't know the cat was there, surprise, he didn't develop any symptoms.)  Of course, my mother didn't like birds, she said they were dirty and spread disease, and I got over that one.

I think what gets me about cats is that (at least as far as I can see) they don't really care whether you like them or not, and for someone with the character flaw of needing everyone to like her (that would be me), cats just don't fit the bill.  A dog or a bird will be utterly devoted to you, to the point of defending you against intruders, saving your life, etc.  I don't think I've ever heard of a cat saving anyone's life, or chasing an intruder off -- our cat generally disappears the moment anyone sets foot in the house.  I'm sure cat people out there will rush to set me straight about cats not caring -- maybe it's just that cats don't care about liking me.  I guess that could be the case.

October and I try to stay out of each other's way (except when he lies in the hall in the middle of the night -- a black cat in the dark) and generally tolerate each other (except for that time when he peed on the quilt on my side of the bed).  We get along all right.