Should a cat be an Indoor or Outdoor Cat?

Risk Assessment

We never want to turn down a wonderful and loving home for a cat. We do however have a duty of care and due diligence to ensure that we are placing cats and kittens in a safe environment. The safety and the wellbeing of a cat or kitten must always come first.

If you take the decision to raise an outdoor cat, you are always taking a risk of it getting hurt by the environment, other animals, (disgustingly) people, or road vehicles.

The Environment

When it comes to environment, although you can make your own garden safe for a cat, other people don’t have to think the same way. However, there’s very little anyone can do about it. If you want to grow the national collection of lilies in your garden next to a deep-water pond and an open water butt surrounding by spikes, there’s nothing to stop you. Honestly though, you either let your cat outside and accept there’s a non-zero risk of them coming to harm through something in their environment, or you keep then inside/in a catio.

Animals

At least in the UK, unlike other countries like the USA, we don’t have many large raptors or animals like coyotes that pose a significant risk to outdoor cats. If you live in a very rural area you might need to think about predation by foxes and badgers, but we strongly suggest that your outdoor cats stay inside at night when such animals are active.

Unfortunately, we do have some utter low‑life humans that want to deliberately hurt animals. Yes, we would like them to be rounded up and put in small rooms to be fed via a flap for the rest of their lives, but it’s not up to us. At least most cats are stealthy, fairly wary of new humans, and have claws, teeth, speed and agility to get themselves out of tricky situations.

So when it comes to major threats to an outside cat, it comes down overwhelmingly to road vehicles.

Roads and Road Vehicles

At the risk of stating, as Basic Fawlty famously once said, “the bleeding obvious”, with roads come vehicles, and vehicles are dangerous. However, with vanishing few exceptions, everyone lives on a road of some description, so we primarily need to focus on main/busy roads.

It’s difficult to make a hard and fast rule on what constitutes “busy”, since some A roads are relatively quiet, and some estate roads are basically 24/7 rat-runs for boy/girl racers. That said, generally we’ll count any major thoroughfare through a town or village as a main road, and therefore “busy”, and estate roads as “quiet” unless we know differently.  

We’d ideally like an outdoor cat to be placed in a home five minutes or more “as the cat walks” from main road. Practically however, especially in East Anglia, almost everyone lives within a short walk of a main road. It’s just how towns develop.

For example, our webmanager colour coded a map of Halstead in Essex, based on whether you could reach a main road within this five-minute “cat walk” (500m/1600ft) from a location. Literally 75% of the town is in that zone. If any animal rescue only rehomed outdoor cats solely to the remaining parts, their job would be made almost impossible.

As a result, we have to make a risk assessment taking account of additional factors in order to reach a reasonably practicable solution.

Distance

Looking purely at distance, we have RAG Rated (Red/Amber/Green) the distance from a location to a main road “as the cat walks” i.e. ignoring garden boundaries, walls, gates etc.

Red: Less than 100m

Amber: Between 100-200m/330-1600ft

Green: More than 200m/650m

Red

There’s no real debate here: you need to raise either an indoor cat (and be incredibly careful it doesn’t escape!) or you need to be prepared to either professionally cat proof your garden or preferably have a catio. A walled garden simply just won’t cut it - within seconds, kitty will absolutely find a way to escape, as they can jump and/or find a way to climb any standard wall you’d be prepared to have round your garden. To be brutally frank, if a cat gets to roam around outside that close to a main road, their life expectancy is going to be measured in days at best.

Without cat-proofing or a catio, we would only be able to place an indoor cat with you, and not a cat that has previously had outside access.

You would need to ensure that all windows are locked, and you check that if you have latches, they are not damaged and are in full working order. All it takes is for a cat to push against an unstable latch and they are out. Not only are they now in an environment they don’t understand, but they are on or near a busy main road.

Amber

This is the tricky zone.

At the closest edge, we’d advise you to seriously consider at least cat-proofing your garden, even if you think a catio is excessive. Kitty can easily wander 100m just checking  out a basic territory to claim, and coming across a main road that crosses something interesting is unlikely to end well.

Equally, at the far edge, a free-ranging cat might be fine, since there should be plenty of opportunities for making an interesting territory without having to go near the danger zone.

If you live in this zone, pull up Google Maps, find your house, and try to think like a cat. Where would you go? If you could climb over walls, would you actually come across something potentially hazardous that wouldn’t be accessible to a human? If you do see something, do consider cat-proofing your garden or a catio. Also, try a GPS tracker at least for a while to see where kitty’s territory is. Most cats stick to their territory, even if they have to share part of it with another cat, so that might show that they aren’t (generally) going near any obvious hazards.

Green

Thankfully this one is fairly clear – you can absolutely raise an outdoor cat here. Whilst kitty might still find their way to a main road, it’s far more likely that they’ll stay relatively close to home and in the (comparatively) safe zone. Nothing is guaranteed – cats do unfortunately get injured or worse on quiet roads after all - but at least the risk is fairly low.

Modifying Factors

Less Adventurous Cats

If you adopt an older cat that’s happy pottering in the garden (even if they were basically Indiana Jones in their youth), living nearer a main road might be more acceptable without a cat-proof garden or catio.

Older cats have usually done their roaming, and all they are looking for is a fantastic forever home. They will be much happier with (supervised) outside access so they can potter around and do a spot of sunbathing.

This also applies to younger cats that have had a bit of a hard time and now prefer to stay close to home. Some cats have found themselves forced to live outside and because of that trauma they might not even want to go out. Also, some previously adventurous cats might have had a bad experience, such as a run in with another animal or getting locked in somewhere at one point. With such kitties, your garden might be more than enough.

Cat proofing your garden

If you can this is definitely the way forward. Cat proofing your garden means that when you are home in the mornings, evening and weekends, you can have doors open and kitty can enjoy the whole garden in safely and securely. In addition, you are also not then restricted to which cats you adopt. Win-win.

Catios

These are just great for an “indoor” cat, although please note these will only work with cats raised from birth as an indoor cat (unless there is a specific reason), as it’s still a major restriction to their environment. The sky’s the limit with a catio and you can build them as big as you would like. This means that kitty gets safe outside access.

See our page on Catios

Garden Oases

What do we mean by that?

Basically, gardens surrounded by other gardens. For example, despite living within the Amber Zone, if your garden has dozens of connecting gardens to the left and right, both next to your house and over the back, it’s far more likely that kitty will find more than enough relatively safe places of interest to develop a territory without having to cross a road.

Is their safety guaranteed? Of course not.

But most cats have enough of a survival instinct to keep away from the horrible hard strips of land with big shouty boxes going up and down them if they have almost limitless access to green spaces with lots of hiding places, dirt to bury their toilet, sunny roofs to bask on, and small creatures to poke at.