Indoor Cat Initiative: Safety & Wildlife Protection.pdf

Indoor cats can live up to five times longer than outdoor cats. Cats are exposed to dangers every time they are allowed to roam outside without supervision, including car collisions, wildlife attacks, fights with other pets, and contracting diseases. Keeping your pet cat indoors ensures they will not get lost and abandoned. Outdoor cats, including feral cats, are contributing to large scale declines of bird populations, estimated to be 100-350 million birds annually in Canada alone. Cats also attack other native wildlife, such as reptiles, rodents, and small mammals.

Responsible cat owners are taking steps to ensure the safety of their cats and reduce the impacts their pets have on native wildlife. This includes keeping their cats safe indoors, allowed outside only if on a leash or in an enclosure, providing an enriched indoors environment, ensuring their cats are spayed/neutered, and providing identification. Many municipalities have cat/pet by-laws that require no-roaming, mandatory ID/license, and spay/neuter.

Transitioning an outdoor cat to an indoor cat can be done with proper training. Introduce controlled access to outdoors, such as cat enclosures or leashed walks, and reduce unsupervised outdoor visits. Spayed/neutered cats have less desire to go outside and roam. Enrich the indoor environment with perches/cat shelves, cat TV, cat furniture, and toys. Actual play-time with your cat is essential.

Cat owners can keep their cats safe indoors by providing love and affection, plenty of cat toys, and a catio. They can also provide food in the bird feeder and a comfy place indoors for their cats to sit and watch. Some cat owners have reported success with transitioning their outdoor cats to indoor cats within a month.

Domestic cats are not part of the natural ecosystem in North America and can have a devastating impact on local wildlife populations. Cats are skilled natural hunters and can fall victim to larger predators such as cougars, coyotes, foxes, and fishers. As a cat owner, the responsibility to keep cats and wildlife separate and ensuring the safety of both starts with you.

Cat owners can access a detailed e-book designed to help them provide a safe and enriched indoors environment for their cats. The e-book includes tips to transition your cat, how to deal with cats that are escape artists, basic cat training, and more. Cat owners can also share their steps to protect cats and birds and enter a draw to win a Cats and Birds goodie bag.