One of the challenges of owning indoor-only cats is that
they don’t always get with the program. They dart out of open doors, find ways
to squirm through gates and partly-opened windows, and so forth. We humans have
yet to find the means to explain to them why they must stay on one side of the
door when there are so many intoxicating smells and things to chase on the
other side.
In our neighborhood, there are all the usual reasons for
keeping cats indoors, plus a few local ones. Predators (mountain lions,
coyotes, bobcats, plus critters who can take on a cat and come out on top, like
raccoons), diseases, ticks, fleas, cars. Things that cats are predators for:
songbirds and helpful garden reptiles, to mention a few.
In our household, the situation is complicated by having a
retired seeing eye dog who has been
trained to open doors. She can’t managed round knobs, but latches are no
problem, nor are sliding screens.
Here are our two cats, Shakir and Gayatri. Despite having
one eye, Gayatri is a fearsome hunter. If we acceded to her wishes, she would
present us with a snake or lizard every single day. Since this would mean
disaster for our garden ecology, we keep her in jail. She gets out
occasionally, which is why we use flea/tick/heartworm prevention on her, and
she always comes back a few hours later, irate that we have not let her in right now.
Shakir, on the other hand, would sniff at a screen door and
then slink away to a cozy basket. We always believed that of the two cats, he
was the stay-at-home. Until one day, we discovered that Tajji, our
afore-mentioned door artiste, had managed to open the sliding screen door. We
did not realize this until some hours after the fact.
“Where’s Gayatri? Oh, thank goodness, she’s here, napping.”
And we did not think to look for Shakir until the next
morning, when he failed to demand his breakfast.
