Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Indoor/Outdoor Cats

In our neighborhood, almost every week there's new posters announcing a missing cat, or an actual dead cat on the street.  That's why, when Reggie joined our family, and Hermie decided that he was now going to be an indoor cat, I was kind of pleased.  We've always had indoor/outdoor cats, but we've never lived in such a busy neighbourhood before.  Although the suburbs can be just as dangerous.  When we lived on a quiet cul-de-sac Hermie got hit by a car and got a broken jaw and lost an eye out of the deal.  I tried to make him an indoor cat after that, but after a few weeks he wasn't having any of it.  He made such a fuss we finally started letting him out again.
 
When we moved close to downtown he was still going outside, but I tried to keep better track of him and made sure he was getting inside often.  Many's the night I'd wake up at 2 am, hearing thunder and get up to let Hermie inside.  It usually went like this:  run down the stairs to the 2nd floor balcony and call for Hermie - no response; run down the stairs to the main floor and call for Hermie - no response; go to the back door and call for Hermie - no response; climb back up all the stairs and go back to bed - MEOW!!!!
 
Ever since we've had Reggie though, he has no desire to go outside - not sure what his reasoning is, but cats are deep thinkers so I'm sure it's very logical.  Having two indoor cats means dealing with a lot of poop and a lot of cat litter and cats with a tendency to porkiness.  I can deal with that, the thing I don't like is that Reggie walks around like a 9 year old a month into summer break.  She clumps around the house meowing that there's nothing to do!  What?  I'm supposed to be entertaining cats now?

So I've started letting her outside in the backyard.  It's Harley-proofed and she's not much of a jumper, so she hasn't tried to escape, and there's geckos and leaves and birds chirping, so it keeps her amused for a while.  She's still very tentative out there though.  She thinks the small pebbles are hot lava, so she only uses the larger stepping stones.  Hermie comes out once in a while just to supervise her.

 
She doesn't last too long out there, she still prefers the indoors.
 

Harley thinks they're both idiots.

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