"Sixty percent of cat owners sleep with their cats, which may enhance their sense of security and improve their quality of sleep"
Maybe, but now only between the hours of 10pm - 5:30am, for me anyway.
Maybe, but now only between the hours of 10pm - 5:30am, for me anyway.
Quick story: for several nights, I'd wake up in the middle of the night with horrendous stomach pains. I was thinking I needed to see the doctor it was so painful. Then on the fourth night when the pain hit I woke up fast enough to notice our cat walking off of my stomach. Turns out he (a 15 lb cat) had been jumping off a shelf through the air about 6 feet and landing directly on my gut. This was instrumental in the decision to keep them away from us ;)
"Pork, lamb, and mutton are the most important sources of T gondii infection, along with game meats such as bear and feral swine."
"A total of 252 women with toxoplasmosis, along with 748 controls from Naples, Lausanne, Copenhagen, Oslo, Brussels, and Milan, were interviewed by telephone or in person. Overall, eating raw or undercooked beef, lamb, or other meats; contact with soil; and travel outside the country were major sources of infection."
Cats don't even make the list of major sources of infection. Further,
"The association of cats and human toxoplasmosis is difficult to assess by epidemiological surveys because soil, not the cats, is the main culprit. Oocysts are not found on cat fur and are often buried in soil along with cat faeces.11 Therefore, direct contact with cats is irrelevant with respect to T gondii transmission, and soil contact is universal and difficult to avoid."
"Pork, lamb, and mutton are the most important sources of T gondii infection, along with game meats such as bear and feral swine."
"A total of 252 women with toxoplasmosis, along with 748 controls from Naples, Lausanne, Copenhagen, Oslo, Brussels, and Milan, were interviewed by telephone or in person. Overall, eating raw or undercooked beef, lamb, or other meats; contact with soil; and travel outside the country were major sources of infection."
Cats don't even make the list of major sources of infection.
Further,
"The association of cats and human toxoplasmosis is difficult to assess by epidemiological surveys because soil, not the cats, is the main culprit. Oocysts are not found on cat fur and are often buried in soil along with cat faeces.11 Therefore, direct contact with cats is irrelevant with respect to T gondii transmission, and soil contact is universal and difficult to avoid."
**Doctor immediately starts thinking about that vacation he's going to be able to take from the extra insurance claims from this one patient alone
One of the neighbors had a very fluffy cat they would let outside, who liked to loaf in the lower branches of our orange trees and my wife likes watching cats lounge about.
Well that particular morning she witnesses a coyote appear from nowhere and snatch the cat. By the time I ran it off, the only thing left of the cat was a pile of fur and it's tail. The coyote jumped over the 6ft tall cinder block fence with the rest of the cat like it wasn't there and ran off.
It was pretty common for cats to go missing in the area and very few folks would heed the warnings about small pets being allowed out.
https://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk491/files...
I'd contest that this is true in general but depend a lot on location - most of the points there don't apply everywhere (albeit I can just assume the vast majority of residential houses in the US).
One more thing that's not mentioned explicitly in that paper that can be good to keep in mind is also that cats can be territorial with the core territory generally having a diameter of 100m - so any neighboring cats close enough can often become an issue.
In general I do think that cats are thriving best when they can roam the outdoors, but it's a very small and shrinking amount of global human-habitated land where that is a good idea. Thinking of this makes me a bit sad for the species.
Growing up we had cats who could come in and out as they wanted. Very rural area in Europe with little traffic or predators. One got hit by a car, one got taken by a fox (both within their first 5 years), one disappeared at 10 (also fox?), one lived to 17 until she died of old age, and one is still around at ~12 (estimated; local stray cat that came included with my parents' new house).
That being said, I am sure you have considered everything and is doing what's best for the cat within your abilities. But maybe see if you can get him some exercise ;)
The corollary to that is I don't want my cat to endanger/kill wildlife or bother my neighbors
Cats are FEROCIOUS hunters, and can quickly have a deleterious effect on the local small wildlife. On top of this, they frequently patrol other people's property, and, if they have indoor cats, can cause serious stress to said indoor cats.
It's just not a great idea.
I had a really rough bout of insomnia, along with a bad mental health stretch not long after she died. I didn’t make the connection until recently that sleep without my cat might have contributed.
But now I have a particularly snuggly pup, which has improved my quality of sleep beyond even that previous high point. We definitely have to adapt more to each other’s schedule. But it’s surprisingly mutual adaptation, and surprisingly malleable.
Sorry for the long personal response. I have no idea how much wiggle room there is with your cat(s), but I hope you find the benefits of the relationship worth whatever tradeoffs come with the sleep schedule.
So I guess I must be the first person dominated by the iron whim of a cat.
I regularly open my eyes in the middle of the night and my cat's face is about 5 inches away from mine, just sitting there perfectly still, staring at me.
New rule: never, ever, open a door when a cat meows. If I'm ready to get up and my cats hear me rustling around and start meowing, I wait until they have stopped meowing for 15 minutes before opening the door.
Now, it's fed at bedtime so it doesn't care what time I get up.
Otherwise they'd assume every time I open the door to go to the toilet or whatever is meal time.
We have a male cat who would meow EVERY MORNING sometime between 2 and 4 am. We tried many kinds of discipline, but it didn't stop until one morning I chased him into hiding downstairs and it hasn't happened since. Every morning after for about a week I would go out of my way to thank him and give him attention.
I know many out there would say that running after him was cruel but it worked and he's still as friendly as can be, and we get to sleep through each night.
Angry cats chase each other. It doesn’t necessarily imply dominance.
I wouldn’t think this is cruel - it’s just a decent way to express your feelings on the matter to your feline, and he understood/learned.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from any kind of safe, instinct triggering corrective action. But I do recommend something similar to what people say about human child discipline: act consistently and with intent.
Don’t accept some instances of a bad behavior sometimes and correct others; if you’ve decided this is your approach stick with it unless you see harm in following through. Don’t overreact out of frustration; think through what you’re going to do, and be sure it’s safe and something you’re gonna be comfortable reflecting on when it’s over.
Of course give them lots of love in the morning and before bed.
I had plans to train a cat meow classifier so I wouldn't activate the can due to other noises, say a fire truck, fireworks, or a neighbor slamming a door shut.
Turns out they fit some standard brands of canned air, I picked up some branded "ecomoist air duster" and it works really well, although slightly quieter, it still seems to work on our kitty.
"I'm just fiddling with my phone over here entirely not related to your meowing and the vacuum coming to get you!"
It can take a while so be patient. My kitty stopped meowing at night after I do this for two weeks, and has never since meowed at night.
- changing the door handles to door knobs, because our lovable asshole had long ago figured out how to open a door, and used that special trick every morning at 4:30am when he wanted to go out.
- installing an RFID triggered electronic cat flap that we installed in the outside wall of my hobby room. It uses the RFID tag that was already in implanted in his neck. Ours is one from Sure Petcare, but there are multiple brands of course.
The cat flap is amazing: it took roughly 1 day to teach him how to open and close it, and now he can leave and enter the house as he wishes: he usually leaves around 4:30am and comes back an hour or two later. We're extraordinary lucky that he taught himself to do this potty business outside, so we don't have a litter box.
Once he learned how to use the flap, he stopped bothering us at night.
An additional benefit is that we can now go out for a weekend without locking him up, using an automated feeder to make sure he stays happy. We can also check leaving/entering activity on an app.
It's a life changer.
You won't have to do this often. Our cats have (mostly) learned this. They are still affectionate, loving cats that desire our company, but they know that meowing at the bedroom door in the night is not allowed.
(and we had to do this for the very same reason, our boy cat loves to be on the bed with us or in the room when we're sleeping. He loves it so much he has to get up and move around every few minutes, trill and purr at us, demand attention, walk around on his people etc etc. He can't be a night-time bed cat because he's just too into it!)