Catios — enclosed outdoor spaces for cats — provide the benefits of outdoor access while protecting cats and wildlife, representing an excellent welfare compromise.
Catios represent an elegant solution to one of companion cat welfare most persistent dilemmas: balancing outdoor enrichment against the real safety and conservation risks of free roaming. By providing outdoor access within a contained space, catios allow cats to experience fresh air, natural light, wildlife sounds, and weather variation — stimuli that indoor environments cannot replicate — without the mortality risks that make free roaming problematic. Even modest catio structures substantially improve cat welfare by adding sensory variety and eliminating the frustration of visual access to an environment they cannot enter. Catios are also a wildlife conservation measure, removing the hunting impact of free-roaming cats from bird and small mammal populations.