Indoors or outdoors - that is the question.

 

This is my namesake playing a game with the cat flap, in order to wind up his human. A great show-off was my Uncle George.

Most cats love being able to leave the house whenever they choose and they also enjoy being able to visit other people's garden, burgle houses to steal other cat's food, slaughter wildlife, and generally wander around at will. 

The downside is the dangers of being run over, of catching diseases from other cats (not high if we are vaccinated) or coming home with fleas - not just fleas from other cats but also rabbit fleas or ticks. Ticks are generally disgusting, as I discovered when being combed by my human who combed out a tick that burst and spread blood everywhere.

Ask a cat, and most of us will choose freedom. Ask the neighbour and mostly they will say get that cat out of my seed beds. Ask a naturalist and they will say keep those serial killers indoors (forgetting that an invasion of mice is bothering the Australians.)

If you want to read up on this, there's a human review "Uncontrolled Outdoor Access for Cats: An Assessment of Risks and Benefits" on Google Scholar.

But I say, just ask your cat. 

 

Cats, squares and human illusiona

 

Some humans have come up with a new theory about cats and boxes. I don't know why they need to publish these idiocies. We cats know why we like boxes - they are warm, they hide us from nosy humans, and we like a tight fit when we sleep.

We also like sitting on squares that are marked out on the floor. Or as these pompous humans put it: "The type of visual illusion considered here is subjective illusory contours, in which one mentally perceives fictitious contours." 

They set up a website asking humans to lay out a two squares on the floor versus one non-square. We sat more often in the squares, even a rather strange square called a Kanitza. These findings, they claimed, revealed "susceptibility to illusory contours" and supported "our hypothesis that cats treat an illusory square as they do a real square."

I considered writing a letter to The Times, who reported this experiment, pointing out that humans are susceptible to the illusion that cats are not capable of taking the mickey. The idea that we were just leading them on in a ridiculous joke seems to have proved their "susceptibility to illusory cat behaviour."

In the end i couldn't be bothered to interrupt my box sleep by putting paw to paper. Maybe it is better to let humans keep their illusions. It makes them easier to manipulate.