Maybe it's also a Vermont thing. I built a cat ladder for some Vermont cats to get up into my daughter's loft bed. The remaining cat disdains the ladder and just scales the bed.
> I find the country also really values animal welfare as a whole.
There are incredibly high and well-known subsidies for animal farming industries here, in addition to a blind eye often turned toward the treatment of said animals. It's arguable that most Swiss people value animal welfare more than many in the US, but saying that the country "really values" it when they opt to pay large sums of money for unnecessary animal suffering, both on the governmental and often individual level, sounds rather absurd to me.
We have a cat that was rescued from a neglectful neighbour. We were shocked one night when it turned up at our back door with a live pet rabbit is had nabbed from a house a few doors away. Thankfully the cat mostly has since caught non-native mice and grasshoppers since (that we are aware of).
The best conservation efforts at restoring native animal populations in Australia have been achieved through cat and fox proof fencing followed by trapping, baiting and shooting programs:
We were shocked one night when it turned up at our back door with a live pet rabbit is had nabbed from a house a few doors away.
Interesting. I once had a golden retriever bring us a baby rabbit from the woods. But he brought it to us in a nurturing way, as if to being it to us for help, not for dinner.
Just another way dogs and cats are different, I guess.
You know what I meant and are choosing to be uncharitable here.
I don't think keeping cats in their indoor "native habitat" will undo millennia of Old World having outdoor cats. Feel free to look up Switzerland's protection of cats instead.
It depends on the country and who you ask. If you ask the UK Government[0] and UK’s RSPB[1] you will find that cats are a predator of birds but there is no evidence that they are the reason for the declining bird population.
In the UK garden birds are on the incline which would be counter to the general public argument that (paraphrasing here) “pet cats are killing all the birds”.
The declining bird population as whole is put down to other factors such has changes to how we farm food, decreasing hedgerows, basically us humans ripping out the birds habitats and not our cats murdering them.
Where I live small rodents are a pest, there is a large number of them and we want to control their number. Cats will stick to their learnt hunting behaviour. If they learn to hunt rodents when they are young then that’s what they will focus on hunting in their adult life’s. So in my area my cat mainly hunts rodents (comparing the numbers of mice she brings home compared to the number of birds she has). So as a kitten (and though out it’s life) play with ground based hunting toys instead of airborne toys. Get them a bell on their collar, and change it up ever now and then.
Now... Am I going to say that this is the case in all countries? Nope. Let’s take Australia where the feral cat population is vastly growing which is causing harm to the native rodent population, but that’s been blamed on the feral population and are being culled and not the domestic cats living with humans.
It's a combination of (a) Switzerland having a high proportion of renters, and apartments being much more common than town houses or detached housing (b) Outdoor cats still being the norm in Switzerland.
It is more about permissive attitudes towards allowing these structures to come up on a communal property and not having strict or anal regulations around aesthetics.
I've never heard of anybody being hit by a rogue cat ladder. They start close to the wall of the building, so are not easily dislodged by wind. Besides, even if the owner is not concerned about pedestrians, they tend to be concerned about the safety of their cat.
Flower pots, OTOH, are an entirely different thing…
i really like the corkscrew stairs! we (in california) have many outdoor cats too. disneyland has a hidden phalanx of them for mousing purposes... oh, the irony!
however i keep mine strictly indoors for peace of mind. to satiate that desire to climb and to combat ennui, i built simple cat shelves/stairs onto the wall of my spartment using hand-sawn boards and metal brackets screwed into the studs. there are 2 paths up and down and around the corner that gives them a way to relieve the zoomies when they strike. my older cat uses them to sun near the window, while the kitten both runs and sleeps on them (and other untold mischief).
In the Rest of the World you do have some cats kept indoors the whole time but it is not the normal thing to do. Only in America are they de-clawed, kept inside an apartment for their whole life and not given special 'cat' rights to do things like climbing really 'dangerous' cat ladders.
Cats very much have their own patch to patrol. Their home is there for them come feeding time. Despite being portrayed as antisocial they do interact with other cats in occupying this larger territory.
In a society where people let their cats patrol their territory it seems cruel keeping them indoors. In a street with lots of cats you would let yours out too. But if all the cats are locked away and not able to roam then you would lock your cat away too.
Interesting how Switzerland also has much more cat friendly traffic than what you get in America. Maybe this is why America has become this place where people lock up cats and daren't let them roam freely.
most people understand declawing is cruel and don't do it. and as i've witnessed far too often in my own neighborhood, feral cats often live short lives and suffer tragic deaths.
unless you have supportive research in human-feline relations, cat population epidemiology and comparative global felis catus sociology buttressing those anti-american presumptions, my cats will continue enjoying their happy indoor lives.
however your experience doesn't generalize, particularly your assessment of the risks and benefits.
i watched a neighbor's cat get hit by a car and then die in my hands. the mortality rate for cats in my neighborhood is probably north of 20% per year (huge). it would be irresponsible to expose my cats to such risk when they're quite content already. mortality would have to be less than 1% (small) for me to reconsider.
They (cats) unfortunately lack the reversible rear feet of squirrels, so down is rather precarious when all your claws face in the "release the hold" direction as you go down.
Not all cats are unable to down climb, Norwegian Forest cats for example are known to down climb head first. [1]
We had the pleasure of housing one temporarily for a couple months. It looked huge but 50% of its volume was wispy fur. Hidden within was a lean petite frame with muscular legs. It was a very different animal from our two other typical mutt house cats, but I can't recall if the claws were organized differently.
This is what my dad explained to me and is further the reason he never helped me down from trees. I'm super thankful for this; I love climbing trees. (And have never seen cat bones in them)
Huh I lived in Switzerland for 5 years and honestly I never noticed them! Maybe they weren't as common in central Zurich where I was. That's what happens when you look at your phone when walking, you miss all the cat-ladders!
This was after moving the cat to an upstairs apt, which had always been an outdoor cat in Vermont.
Took him like two months to figure it out, even after terrifying and pissing him off by stranding him in the middle of it.
He was a thankful and happy cat when he finally realized his freedom.
Ours was uglier than all of the shown above (a spiral staircase around a pvc pipe), but it was a fun project and very rewarding.