There is a bird bath in our garden frequented by fairywrens and red-browed finches. We put it under the flowering elm tree so the little birds would feel protected and hang out there for longer. It’s a few metres from our back door. Most days, when the sun hits that part of the floorboards, our cat Laurie can be found there, lazing in a sunbeam watching the birds through the glass. Sometimes, when they hop closer, she will sit up and make little chattering noises. It’s cat TV: enriching for her, safe for the oblivious birds.
I wish I could say we’d done it for the birds’ sake. But like an extraordinary number of decisions in the past 13 years, I did it for Laurie.
Last week the federal government released the draft feral cat management plan, which aims to reduce the number of feral cats in Australia and halt, or even reverse, the number of native species being driven to extinction by these highly efficient predators. The Invasive Species Council responded by calling on the New South Wales government to introduce laws requiring that cats be kept indoors.
I am not here to make the case that cats should be kept indoors for the sake of local wildlife – that case has been made over and over and over and over again. Cat owners know these arguments, and if they have not been persuaded by the fact that cats kill more than 6 million native animals in Australia a day they will not be persuaded by me.
There is a fairly tedious assumption that if you love wildlife you must hate cats, and visa versa. And nothing will turn cat people off faster than encountering a person who hates cats.
I understand this. I also hate people who hate cats. So let’s set the birds and the bettongs to one side for the moment, and consider the other, obvious fact: cats should be kept indoors for the sake of cats.
Laurie is the fifth cat I’ve lived with and the first to be an indoor-only cat. When I adopted her in 2010 I lived in a flat near a busy road. I couldn’t afford unexpected vet bills, so I decided to keep her indoors. She escaped a few times when she was younger, usually making it no more than one body length from the door before freezing in terror at the overwhelming vastness of the outdoors. Once, when we were visiting my parents’ farm, I clipped her into a harness with the expectation that she would enjoy exploring the yard, but she flattened her robust body to the ground and refused to move.
She turns 14 next month. We’ve moved states four times and houses eight, and she has never been out of sorts for more than a day. Until last year, she had no major health issues. She has never been injured. I have never been woken by the awful howl of a cat fight. I’ve never had a sleepless night worrying about where she is or whether she’ll make it home safely, although I have had a few caused by her trying to hog the pillow. Her only hunting trophy is one small gecko, the back half of which I found on my bed one morning as a present. I am not sure whether she killed it or found it dead in the kitchen, and having watched her fail to catch moths I suspect the latter.
There was a moment, in our first winter in this house, when we woke to the sound of rats chewing the ceiling, then I wished my old cat Elmo was still alive. Elmo was the most efficient mouser and ratter I have ever seen: he could kill with one blow of his paw. When we uncovered a nest under the fruit trees my sister shrieked and fetched Elmo, and he killed 12 mice in five minutes.
The efficiency was not confined to rodents. He once caught a microbat from a standing two-metre leap and was the source of many colourful feather bombs that had once been parrots. In his later years he sat with one back leg out, the relic of a bad cat fight which caused an infected joint. His compatriot, Nugget, lived to 19, but only because she lost a front leg at the age of three which significantly curtailed her roaming. Nugget used to disappear for days on end. Once, when she hadn’t been seen for a week, my sister and I doorknocked the neighbours’. She returned a day later, her paw destroyed from being caught in an illegal clawed rabbit trap. The leg was amputated. She caught a rabbit the day after her stitches were removed.
Nugget was the first cat in our family to die of old age. The two before her and Elmo were hit by cars, three before that simply disappeared. If Nugget hadn’t lost the leg and decided to stick closer to home, I doubt she would have lived past five. That is the average life expectancy for an outdoor cat in Australia. Indoor cats live into their late teens.
Laurie, by mutual agreement, will live forever. As I write she’s snoring gently on a pile of heated pads that have been stacked, Princess and the Pea-style, on her bed next to the fireplace. She is safe and fulfilled, and the birds outside the window have no fear of anything stalking through the bushes. Keeping cats indoors is a rare solution where everybody wins.
