How Far Do Your Cats Roam?

Because most of the time they hang around the house. If you read the article and watch the video they say that a small minority go exploring. Most people also keep them inside at night. Furthermore since they are generally fed well by owners they have diminished interest in hunting. Keep in mind that dogs are locked up because they are usually a lot larger than cats and can attack people. It also helps that they aren't as good at jumping and climbing as cats. If dogs could jump and climb like cats then people wouldn't own them as pets.

> it drove me crazy that people would just let their un-spayed, un-neutered cats wander around to become their neighbors' vicious little problems.

This drives me insane, too. We've got some neighbors who apparently refuse to neuter their cats, and therefore they tend to wander and are highly aggressive. I suspect they're also not inoculated, and more curiously in my state (of the US), all domestic animals must at least be inoculated against rabies--so if their cats were to bite someone, they could face substantial fines. I'd imagine they aren't aware of this. (They've also had a number of dogs that have turned aggressive, gotten hit by cars, and have presented themselves as a neighborhood nuisance, so it's not the animals fault... some people just shouldn't have pets).

The other problem is that I suspect they got the cats to keep local rodent populations down, but then they reason that the rodents should augment much of the cats' diets, so they feed them very infrequently (and thus, they tend to roam looking for food). According to local lore, resident snowbirds who move around for 3-6 months out of the year tend to get cats for this reason, then leave them behind when they depart for seasonal reasons under the assumption the cats will be there when they return. Often, they're not.

Sigh.

Not everyone lives in a densely populated area where it's a problem. Or where rabies is a problem for that matter.

Although I don't really see the issue. Cats are really harmless and tend to stay close to home. They have been roaming free around human settlements for thousands of years.

Cats are not domesticated in the same way dogs are. There is a wide genetic variance in cats, coming from hundreds or thousands of local strains. Dogs are two or three main groups, bred over 1000's of years to make the kinds we see today.

Why does that matter? Well, cats are not always let free; sometimes they've always been there. Feral cats can be the ones that nobody has tamed yet. As for 'destructive', that's how nature works. You might prefer the doves, but the kitty has her own ideas and they're not vicious little problems, they're behaving as god intended.

Now I'm not sure if cats were native to North America, so there it might be negligence. But consider the parrots of San Francisco, living in large groups in the parks. Parrots are expensive; probably they are descended from those that escaped out an open window. Nobody intended for them to roam free, they did that on their own.

Interesting consideration, but is it a legitimate concern? For the actual "Bunchers", it seems like there are much easier ways of acquiring cats than trying to steal domestic cats. And for cat owners, free roam cats face an endless array of very serious perils, including disease, cars, malicious neighobors/teens, dogs, coyotes, etc. I can't imagine that people stealing cats for research account for much more than a blip compared to the completely banal sources of imminent mortality when a cat runs free.