All the comments saying 'this is why you should never let your cats outside', implying that owners who let their cats out are somehow neglecting their pets are so surprising to me, as while there are a handful of cat breeds who don't like going outside, those breeds are massively in the minority.

Cats are NOT a fully domesticated animal. They all want to roam, hence when you go into a cat owner's front door who keeps their cats inside, you always here the cry of 'don't let the cat out!'.

When you let them roam and they choose to come back to you, that's them saying to you 'yeah - OK, you'll do as an owner, I'll stay'. A domesticated pet chooses to stay because it wants to. When you force a cat into your little apartment and never let it out, is that even a pet, or is it just a animal you've trapped in your home, and who would run away at the first chance it got?

I've owned a number of Burmese cats throughout my life and the idea of forcing them to stay in seems SO cruel, and practically impossible. They are VERY vocal, VERY active and VERY smart, and if they want something they'll meow their head off at you for it, and if you don't do it then they'll figure out how to do it themselves when you're not looking. As an example - almost all the Burmese I've had have very quickly figured out how to jump up and work door handles. If I didn't have a cat flap in my backdoor then any open window/unlocked door would be a danger, as there's a good chance they'd spot something they want and try and jump for it, even if it's too high.

I think about the amount of time my cats will spend rolling around in the grass in the sun, jumping after butterflies or stalking pigeons (so slowly and carefully, but never successfully) and it makes me sad that some people would think this would be 'bad ownership' and that locking their cat up inside for it's entire life is somehow better! Give them all the scratching posts you want, give them a whole indoor cat playground if you like, but the truth is, we wouldn't consider anything to be an adequate replacement for the true outdoors when it comes to us and our kids, and it's not for them either.