First, a confession: I am the
previous owner of several outdoor cats. I believed I was doing the right thing.
My cats were neutered. They had food, shelter, and regular vet visits. They were
free to climb trees and chase butterflies. I loved to watch them stalking in
the garden like miniature tigers.
When the first one, black Grendel, came back
from one of his nights on the town with one ear and half his face torn off, I
rushed him to the vet, who managed to sew him back together. Soon after that,
Grendel went away again and never came back.
The next one, an orange
kitten named Gato, somehow broke his leg while playing in the garden. The vet
put it in a cast. When the cast came off, Gato went exploring, and we never saw
him again.
Mitsou was an exquisite chocolate-point
Siamese. Her head and face were round, a throwback to the days before
anorexic-looking, sunken-cheeked cats reminiscent of runway models became
fashionable. In love with her looks, and tired of losing cats, I kept her
indoors, where she ruled the household, especially the dogs, for seventeen
years.
I adopted Pascal, a black and
white kitten who had been abandoned by his mother, before his eyes opened. He
had to be fed every two hours, so I put him in a cardboard box and took him to the
office. After each feeding I would take him to the bathroom where I would enact
a mother cat’s attentions by wiping his nether regions with a washcloth dipped
in warm water.
As Pascal grew, and grew, so
did his affection for me. I could not sit down without huge, rangy Pascal
flinging himself on top of me, purring and kneading and drooling, eyes
half-closed in bliss. If I had left the back door open, I doubt that he would
have chosen to leave my side. But I didn’t. Pascal was an indoor cat.
But then we moved to a suburb
of DC and I had a long commute, which meant that we had to install a dog door
so the dog could let himself out to the fenced-in yard during the day, which also
meant that Pascal became an indoor-outdoor cat.
He had a grand time, and became
an expert hunter of moles, something that neither his mother nor I had ever
taught him. His record was nine moles in a single evening, which he laid in a
row next to my lawn chair while I sat watching the sunset.
But within six months he was
dead--poisoned, we think, by licking antifreeze off somebody’s driveway.
You see where this is going?
While many an indoor cat lives
as long as twenty years, the average lifespan of an outdoor cat is two to three
years. Needless to say, my present top-predator-in-residence, Telemann, lives
strictly indoors.
But Telemann’s safety is only
half the reason why I keep him in the house. The other half is the welfare of
the innocent chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, rose-breasted grosbeaks,
goldfinches and woodpeckers who come to our feeders.
There is no doubt in my mind
that, despite his exquisite diet of raw turkey, given five minutes in the yard sweet
Telemann would turn into a bird-killing machine. According to the Bird Conservancy,
in the U.S. cats kill approximately 2.4 BILLION birds a year. This makes cat
predation the largest human-caused threat to birds (human-caused because we’re
the ones who let the cats outside).
With a pane of glass between
them, however, Telemann and my birds coexist peacefully. It didn’t take long
for the birds to figure out that the kitten swatting at them just inches away
from the feeder was prevented by some invisible magic from catching them.
For Telemann, the birds
outside the window are just another joy in the joy-filled life that we strive
to provide for him. When they are eating, he leaps from windowsill to
windowsill to get the best view, looking fierce and waving his tail like a
tiger on the hunt.
And then there are the
squirrels, gray like him and almost his size, bold enough to “touch” noses
through the glass. They are the big game, the zebras and wildebeest of Telemann’s
savannas.
Is Telemann frustrated because he can’t crunch
on the neck of a titmouse, or sever a squirrel’s spine? Probably. It is in Telemann’s
nature to enjoy killing things, just as it is in mine to enjoy eating the flesh
of lobsters boiled alive. But I don’t, and I survive the deprivation, and so
does he. Telemann and I already have almost too much pleasure in our lives.
But the birds, those little
harmless beautiful bits of Nature, are threatened everywhere by the loss of woods and
fields and bugs and wildflowers. They suffer from sudden and bizarre weather
events. And they are eaten by the small tigers that we love. They need all the
help they can get.
So Telemann does his bit by
staying inside, and I do mine every morning, when I clean his litter box.
