You make a convincing argument there, Stilly.

I expect that people's opinions on this are often influenced by their childhood experiences. We always lived in the country when I was a kid, and we always had outside cats, as our ancestors had done before us, so the whole idea of the outside cat is one I simply take for granted. It doesn't seem right to me to incarcerate a cat indoors for its entire life. It's so....icky sort of control freak sounding...just to me, you understand, because of my personal background.

That basically is why I like the idea of letting cats go outside. I'm used to it. I am well aware that they kill a lot of small animals. I accept the fact that they do as a basic fact of life, and I doubt that cats are at all likely to exterminate any species of bird in North America.

I presently own no cat, however, so put your mind at rest. I am in no way imperilling the many birds that happily exist in the 10 acres or more of forest behind this house. A few of our neighbours have roaming cats, and I couldn't care less whether or not they did.

You should see Trinidad! (maybe you have...) Not many cats to be seen, only a few...but...there are literally hundreds of thousands of roaming dogs...all over the place, totally free to wander where they wish. And the amazing thing is, it doesn't seem to bother people a bit. The dogs and the people and everything else coexist just fine. I like the Trinidad dogs. They call them "pothounds". Most of them sort of live somewhere...that is, they hang around a certain house or neighborhood in a fairly predictable manner.

Smaller, less potentially dangerous dogs wandered around outside freely in the small towns I lived in in the 50's. No one cared. We kids knew those dogs by name ("King", "Baron", "Perky", "Frisky"), and sometimes the dogs tagged along with us when we played in the vacant lots, just like Spanky and the Little Rascals in those old films. God, it was great. Well, you sure as hell don't see that anymore in North America now, because EVERYTHING has a restrictive rule of law applied to it now! I love freedom, and I am not impressed by what happens when a society gets too overdeveloped and way too overlegislated.

What people think is either "okay" or "unacceptable" varies wildly from one culture to another...and it's mostly dependent on nothing more that what they are already used to and think is "normal". It's largely arbitrary, in other words.

This debate about inside and outside cats didn't exist in the world I grew up in.