How to evaluate the welfare trade-offs of indoor versus outdoor access for cats and what management approaches best balance risk and enrichment.
The indoor-outdoor question for cats is genuinely difficult and context-dependent. A cat in rural Scotland faces different risks and benefits compared to a cat in urban Los Angeles. The key welfare variables are the quality of the indoor environment (well-enriched indoor environments reduce the welfare gap with outdoor access significantly), the specific risks of the outdoor environment (traffic, disease, predators, theft), and the cat's individual personality and history. Solutions that provide the enrichment benefits of outdoor access without the full risks — catios, leash walking, enclosed garden systems — offer a welfare-positive middle ground that deserves more attention than the binary indoor/outdoor framing suggests.