Evidence-based approaches to enriching the lives of indoor cats across all sensory modalities — visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and cognitive — to support genuine wellbeing rather than mere survival.
Indoor-only cat welfare depends entirely on human-provided environmental richness. Unlike outdoor cats who self-enrich through hunting, exploration, and social interaction with conspecifics, indoor cats rely on their human companions to provide the sensory stimulation, movement opportunities, and behavioral outlets that constitute a good life. The welfare consequences of environmental poverty in cats — chronic understimulation and inability to express natural behavior — manifest as the behavioral problems most commonly cited by cat owners: aggression, destructiveness, house soiling. These are not character flaws but welfare deficits with clear environmental solutions. A genuinely enriched indoor environment requires deliberate design across multiple sensory and behavioral dimensions.