I get it. Cats, if they have a preference, like to be outside. Especially if they have previously had an outdoor experience and enjoyed it. Many indoor cats that sleep all day along windowpanes or in front of glass doors are very content looking at the outside world, and if they are stimulated with indoor playtime, they are perfectly content living in the house. Now I have some clients who have rescued outdoor cats, and some of those cats will do just about anything to get outside. This story is about one of those cats, named Jessie.
To say that I have worked on Jessie is an understatement. I have seen Jessie for a myriad of injuries. To this date, I have surgically placed drains in Jessie three times for abscesses. I have seen Jessie twice for bite wounds that did not require surgical drains. I have had to remove a broken tooth and have had to surgically remove a foreign body out of her intestines, and we have no idea how she lost the tip of her ear. She is a hunter. Like most cats, she brutally hunted the birds in her territory. These cats also hunt rodents and iguanas, and they get into fights with other cats in the neighborhood.
My client felt that he watched Jessie most of the day. He had set up remote cameras in the backyard to watch Jessie, and when he got home from work, he fed her in the house and closed the door, so she stayed inside at night. When I asked him why he couldn’t keep her in the house during the day, he showed me a picture of all the furniture that she had destroyed when she couldn’t get outside during the day. Ironically, she didn’t destroy furniture at night and slept after dinner until he ritually allowed her out at 8 a.m. before he went to work. He must have gotten up on the weekends when he was not going to work to let her outside. I guess her routine trumped his weekend routine.
One day the owner sent me a video of a fight between Jessie and another cat. Jessie was asleep on the patio and another cat hopped the fence. Jessie went into attack mode. Typically, after seeing how fast and aggressive Jessie was, a cat would run away, but this cat didn’t, and the fight was quick and brutal. This episode resulted in Jessie’s last surgery. There was an abscess over her neck and bite wounds on her face and feet. Jessie spent the next two days in the hospital getting pain medication and antibiotics.
We watched the video over and over. The owner just could not understand how the fight had occurred. He had installed a six-foot privacy fence. His last fence was a four-foot chain-link fence with hedges. He also had cameras installed. He even had a funny sign put on the fence about his attack cat. He could not understand why another cat would jump the fence. I had to bite my lip not to sound condescending, and my technician had to leave the room. I explained to the owner that the privacy fence, signage, and cameras were there to designate his property lines to the world. The invading cat’s territory was probably the whole street, and he probably found the new fence annoying. The owner asked me what he could do, and I told him to keep Jessie inside, because the next fight could end up being her last one.
One year later, Jessie is a couch cat and sleeps most of the day happily on the furniture.