People who don't let their cats out...

One of the things I can't get my head around is people who don't let their cat out... a man on Facebook recently said his cat had escaped and he had had to go any rescue it.  It wasn't even missing just two doors down or something and hadn't even been gone a whole day.  He said he lived in a dangerous area with lots of busy traffic so only let them play in in a walled garden.  "They're my babies."  No, they're not mate, they're cats.  They have their own parents.  

These cat captors always remind me of my music teacher Miss* Rainbow's mother Mrs Rainbow's cat Chink.  Miss Rainbow's mother was a cultured intelligent woman capable of very intellectual conversation but unfortunately she was also suffering from mental decline.  If you went out the room and came back in then she'd completely forget she'd ever met you and the conversation would start again as if you were literally meeting for the first time.  Chink, who she never let out and used to take for walks on a bit of string, had learned to exploit these President-Biden-like qualities to get constantly fed as Mrs Rainbow would keep forgetting that she'd fed Chink every time Chink went in and out of the room so Chink would constantly pop in and out of the kitchen to get fed again.  The result was that Chink was the fattest cat you have ever seen - about the size of three normal cats.  Eventually Mrs Rainbow had to have permanent care and was taken into an old people's home.  Miss Rainbow then radically redecorated the house which had had the same decor for about 50 years as Mrs Rainbow was still convinced it was 1950 and Chink went on a rapid diet and gradually reduced in size from three cats size to normal cat size.  Eventually he was even able to get up off the floor and sit on my lap when I was playing the piano and dig his claws in... but it's always left me with the belief that it's just not right to not let cats out...

Then I thought is this reasonable?  Well, Larry the cat lives at 10 Downing Street and he's allowed out on his own.  He's never been run over... Although Larry's coworker Freya (drafted in by Cameron to create a competitive mousing market) was hit by a car and had to see a vet and was retired to the countryside after wandering too far away from home.  Previous to that predecessor Peter II was run over and killed by a car in 1947.  Peter II replaced Peter I who was put down aged 17 because the Attlee government decided he was inefficient.  And he wondered why his majority was slashed to 5 at the next General Election.  Anyway, one cat death per hundred years seems a reasonable pet death risk to take...?  Okay, maybe not...

* Note to feminist historians ....

Ms wasn't in common parlance till the mid-80s so they were Mrs & Miss.  Due to the formality of the age one was not allowed to address teachers by their first name - even music teachers - but Ms Rainbow later told me her name was Marguerite.  I don't know what Mrs Rainbow's first name was but I do remember Marguerite showing me a photograph of her great grandfather who was the butler in the Tichborne fraud / impersonation case trial (see here).  The kind of thing that happened before DNA when people who were greedy would claim to be rich dead relatives of missing persons in an attempt to inherit lots of money.  (See Anastasia.)  There was a film made about it a decade ago... (see here).