Keeping Indoor and Outdoor Cats Safe
Helpful Ways To Keep Predators Away From Your Cat
Whether to keep your cat indoors, outdoors or both has been a debate that has gone on for years. Many cat owners may decide in purchasing and placing a cat door in their home. Cat doors are most generally plastic flaps placed in a wall or door to let a cat come inside and go outside as it pleases.
As you might know, keeping your cat indoors is the safest of all three ways to house your cat. Being indoors guarantees safety from all predators including poison, dogs, thieves, cars and wild animals. But, if your cat is one of those that is just not happy indoors all day, here's some tips to ensure better safety.
Feeling Safe While Using Cat Doors
A generic chain link fence might not work with keeping your cat in the yard. A cat is known to climb anything and everything in sight. Some of the indoor/outdoor cats might have had their claws removed which still doesn't prevent climbing. Most of the time the hind leg claws are kept in and their front paws get extra strong as a defense mechanism.
So, since chain links won't always work out with a cat, how can you keep your cat in the preferred location outdoors? When feeling crafty, build a nice outdoor play area with a connection to your cat door. This consists of wood, mesh and fish netting. This outdoor home creates the feel of the outdoors and safety for your cat. There are many other types of outdoor enclosures for cats. Some can be found at your local pet store and any can be found online, at CatFence.com.
If building an outdoor cat enclosure is not an option at this moment but you still want your cat to be able to use its door, then you might want to consider giving it supervised play time outdoors during the day and completely closing the door at night. Night might be more dangerous due to many factors such as drivers not being able to see what's in the road as well and predators hunting. Wildlife, such as bobcats, prefer hunting at dusk and dawn. Bobcats are not the only cats that are predators. Domesticated cats are also predators to smaller wildlife including birds, mice and reptiles. So, you are not only keeping your cat safe, you are keeping wildlife safe as well.
Concluding Tips
Keep in mind that cats are not safe outdoors due to diseases, poisons and predators. Many domesticated cats have gotten used to roaming both indoors and outdoors for years so changing might be hard.
- Build and connect to your cat door an enclosed outdoor home for your cats to play in.
- If the above is not possible, have supervised play time outside during various hours of the day.
- Make sure to close your cat door at night to keep your cat safe from night predators and to prevent wildlife coming into your home.
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