I feel similarly about cats. I absolutely love cats but I didn’t have one for five years because I refuse to own one in an apartment. It seems like people torture animals to make sure that they have some attention when they get home
Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.
That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?
Your entire comment screams of a PETA ad warning about cruelty to ferrets without realizing that domesticated ferrets literally can and will not survive in nature in 99% of cases. Their "wild" instincts are gone. Cats aren't nearly as helpless, but are similarly co-evolved to domestic life.
I’ll throw it back at you, maybe if you left that meeting you would find that it had less consequences than you are imagining.
But when humans do it’s unnatural?
And besides, if you saw how hairy I am you’d probably reconsidered your opinion.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cat-brains-have-sh...
And smaller brains
Aren’t mutually exclusive
https://petapixel.com/2026/03/24/wildlife-photographer-of-th...
Then further down the page, "A sika deer carries the interlocked severed head of a rival male that had died after their battle". Nature, eh.
My indoor-outdoor cat only catches small animals if they run between her paws. But she did chase a rather large raccoon around the house once, as I did.
In my suburban neighborhood, we occasionally have coyotes. They are known to prey on fat cats (the feline kind).
My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
I also feel that small wild cats were likely native everywhere. Birds were probably not their primary prey; small reptiles and mammals, i.e. animals that don't fly, nest in trees, or live in flocks.
It’s just something we’ve all been told all our lives, with the people doing the telling never point to any evidence to back it up.
Even when cats are wild and native, their hunts aren’t particularly successful, except the desert sand cat[1] which is so small it would perish if its hunts were low rate success.
And if you watch videos of collar cameras on cats, they seem to spent all their time doing a perimeter check, having a quick social interaction with other cats doing the same, and maybe brushing up against a frigidly neighbour human.
The idea that a house cat that has warmth, food, water, bedding, would bother to waste time killing small birds and mammals that have hardly any meat on them anyway is fairly unbelievable.
Feral cats are a different story. But don’t blame responsible cat owners for that problem.
I was at a wildlife sanctuary in Tasmania, about 50 minutes drive from where I live.
The tour guide said something like: every year 250,000 native animals are killed every year on Tasmanian roads.
And I just blurted out: and they just keep coming.
Because, obviously, if it was a problem then that number wouldn’t be sustained. It’s kind of self evident that the deceased animals free up resources and territory for the living animals, who then go on to have more offspring.
I feel the same about cats: if they were a problem for the native fauna, we’d expect that problem to have auto-resolved by now, as in the cats would have killed all the native fauna.
But, like all environmental problems, it’s perennial: the problem always needs more funding, more restrictions on human activity, increased red tape for developers, and home owners who want to manage their land. Like you can cut a tree down until after it falls on your house and kills your infant.
Again, I don’t believe it’s well fed house cats that are allowed outside that are the problem, it’s the ferals that need to kill to survive.
And there are ways to solve that problem, or at least greatly curtail it.
They’ll devastate anything farmers intend to do.
They’re public enemy number one here in Australia.
Pretty sure cats love climbing things, and stairs are no different.
One of our cats has arthritis and before we got her treatment she didn’t like them, but she’s perfectly happy now.
One day Seven of Nine might be eaten by a raccoon but I’ve seen the GoPro footage, she has a blast every day of her life. As a side-effect benefit, she doesn’t play games with me because her entire world is filled with games she can play herself. We still sleep curled up together though :)