Outdoor cat welfare involves genuine risks including infectious disease, injury, predation, and toxin exposure that must be weighed against the behavioral benefits of environmental enrichment and territory expression.
Outdoor cat welfare requires honest accounting of both the benefits and the costs of outdoor access rather than defaulting to either unrestricted access or complete confinement as the obvious right answer. The behavioral benefits of outdoor access are real for many cats — territory expression, hunting behavior, environmental complexity. The risks are also real and result in significantly shorter lifespans for outdoor cats. Compromise solutions that provide environmental benefit while managing risk — catios, supervised access, enclosed gardens — serve welfare on both dimensions.