"William Graham" wrote in message
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"David" wrote in message
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"William Graham" wrote in message
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"David" wrote in message
William, I would appreciate it if you consider this hypothetical
situation for me and tell me how you would react in it.

Let's say that you own 10 cats and are forced to move to a very busy
city. Your home is several thousand square feet with all sorts of room
for the animals (remember, we're talking hypothetical).

You allow your cats to roam outdoors. The first night that you live
there, one of your cats is splattered on the road and another makes it
back into your home but is seriously injured, hardly able to move,
shaking from the severe pain it is in. You try to get it to the animal
hospital but it dies before you get there.

On day number two you lose three more cats, all close enough to your
home that you can stand on your porch and see their flattened corpses
on the busy road you live next to.

Day number three is pretty good- one cat comes home and was obviously
tortured by a neighborhood kid but he will live. Although this cat
used to be the most emotional cat you ever had, purring and rubbing up
against you on a hourly basis, he now sits under the kitchen table,
almost motionless, never making a sound. The only time he ever moves
is when you come near him, and then he runs in the opposite direction
as fast as he cant.

On day number four you lose one cat to a neighbors robotic lawn mower
and another cat to neighbor hood kids playing with pellet guns and
slingshots. Another was killed by a car.

In case you haven't been counting, you now have two cats left. Are you
honestly telling me that you would LET these cats out and shrug it off
as "just life" if they died? Personally, I would find YOU responsible
for their deaths.

David

It is true that cats can't have everything they want, any more than any
other animal or human can have anything he/she wants, but it is also
true that you will have to put up with your indoor cat running out every
chance he gets for a long long time, so you will have to get used to it.

As to your hypothetical situation:

So, your hypothetical situation couldn't possibly occur with me.

William,

The neat thing about hypothetical situations is that you can consider
them regardless of if they actually have a chance of becoming reality.

You give advice and try to persuade people who are in very different
situations than you are- the least you can do is consider this topic from
the perspective of a different situation!

I'll try again:

__IF__ you were in the hypothetical situation (pretend you had some
sci-fi life-swap if it helps you), WOULD YOU allow the remaining two cats
to roam outside on day number five?

David

I thought I made it clear that I am totally unable to answer that
question, since it is beyond my experience. As to my giving advice to
others, I always make it clear that I have no experience with their
situation if that happens to be the case.....I usually start out with that
disqualifying statement. I will usually say something like, "I only have
outside cats, but....."

Yes, you do a good job qualifying your responses. This doesn't make you
incapable of considering a situation.

If someone takes my advice on the matter as that of an expert on inside
cats, well, that's their bad judgment, and not mine.
Realistically, how can you expect an answer to your hypothetical
question? You paint a picture of someone who lives in such a horrific
environment that 8 of their 10 outside cats are killed in a relatively
short period of time, and then ask them whether they might consider
keeping their cats inside.....this is ridiculous.

It's an exaggerated situation. The point of it was to see if there were any
conditions whatsoever under which you would justify keeping a cat "locked"
indoors.

I would consider not keeping any cats at all before I considered keeping
10 cats inside. Is that an answer?

Not really but I guess I could make assumptions based on it. Perhaps if you
were in the given situation you would simply lock all the cats out of your
home and not care for any of them...

Please realize that I am not insinuating that you would actually put
yourself in the situation that I described. I was just wondering what you
would do if you had magically found yourself in that situation. If you
refuse to play along, that's fine.

Just for the record. I lived on the intersection of Santa Cruz Avenue and
Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California for 15 years. During that time I
had a couple of cats, and my neighbor had one, and none of the three were
run over by vehicles, even though cars, trucks, and busses went by 24-7.
Because of the traffic on that intersection, I would never have considered
getting a cat. The two I had wandered in from somewhere else, and all I
did was to give them shelter and food. I made no attempt to get them to
stay with me at all, nor did I expect them to survive for very long. They
both did survive for over ten years, however, and died natural deaths.