catio – Pain In The Bud

Your neighbors probably aren’t giving your cats flowers or serenading them with Marvin Gaye songs, and hopefully they’re not giving them chocolates, but they may be cat seducers anyway.

The term dates back at least a few years and it describes neighbors who lure pet cats into their homes, ply them with food, even buy them beds and collars, all in an attempt to gain effective “ownership” of the felines in question without having to worry about vet bills or declare to landlords that they have a cat.

Reports of cat seduction are rife with anecdotes about seducers ignoring polite requests from the owners not to feed their cats and even questioning whether the original caretaker is meeting their needs. Some distressed people report their cats are gone for days at a time and rarely return home as the seducers ignore healthy feeding limits and do everything they can to keep the felines in their homes.

Naturally, cat seduction is primarily a problem in the UK. While the culture around feline companions is changing across the Atlantic as people opt for measures like catios and harness training, the majority of British caretakers still believe their little buddies need outdoor time to remain stimulated and happy.

As readers of PITB know, Buddy is an indoor-only cat, and definitely not because he’s frightened of going outside. The problem is, he’s so meowscular, ripped and yuge that neighbors who might spot him crossing a yard at night or padding powerfully down the sidewalk are likely to freak out and call authorities to report a large cat, possibly a jaguar or tiger, is loose in the neighborhood.

So obviously I have to keep him inside not for his safety, but for the safety and sanity of our neighbors. We’re considerate like that here at Casa de Buddy.

A woman named Amy told The Guardian her cat was gone so often, she put a tracker on his collar to find out where he was spending his time. That’s when she realized he was in a neighbor’s house “constantly.” The neighbor, who says she can’t adopt a cat of her own because she travels frequently, was not cooperative when Amy asked her to stop feeding her pal.

“Cats are cats – they have no concept of human boundaries,” Amy told the newspaper. “She’s literally enticing him away.”

A sign warning admirers not to feed Buddy, who has been known to solicit snacks from the balcony by meowing to passersby.

Alison Ward, who also spoke to The Guardian, said her cat Scooby started coming home “reeking of marijuana” and well-fed “but quite deranged.”

Ward figured out Scooby was being enticed into the home of a group of roommates, all men in their 20s, who had renamed the little guy, purchased food bowls for him and even got him a collar.

“They said they thought he was their cat,” she said.

Online resources dedicated to cat seduction warn of telltale signs. If you’ve restricted your cat’s diet on a veterinarian’s instructions, for example, and the cat is not losing weight or even gaining it, that’s a clear sign the little one is a Six Dinner Sid, bouncing between home and at least one other neighbor’s house. Other signs include constantly “lost” collars, inexplicable grooming, disinterest in the cat’s usual food, and returning home with unfamiliar scents attached to them.

On a subreddit for UK users, several people shared anecdotes about cat seduction.

“My mum’s two cats started disappearing for a day or two here and there. She figured they were shacking up at a neighbours house occasionally which didn’t bother her too much,” a user wrote. “Then one day they both just completely disappeared. Months later she found out who it was that had been sheltering them during those missing periods, and they also happened to have moved away right around the time that the cats disappeared.”

Others worried about their affectionate and sociable cats, and there was a general consensus that social media, particularly posts and memes about the “cat distribution system,” can lead to people believing it’s okay “to take any friendly cat home with them because it ‘chose’ them.”

Of course there’s a simple solution: don’t allow your cat to roam outside unattended.

While some argued that people should keep their cats indoors to keep them safe from dangers like getting hit by cars, as well as to prevent them from killing birds, others rejected the idea. Some even blame US cat lovers for normalizing the practice of keeping cats indoors.

“Oh, you don’t agree with the American way of doing things, well you’re just wrong,” one user wrote. “They’ll rant about the dangers of coyotes etc to cats, while refusing to accept that’s not an issue here. Friends in the US were genuinely shocked when I explained that rabies was eliminated here a long time ago.”

Header image via Pexels

We’ve written quite a bit about Turkey and how it serves as a model for co-existence and fondness between humans and cats, as well as other animals.

In Turkey — and especially in ancient Istanbul, the most populous city in Europe — cats are fed, welcomed into homes and shops, and taken care of by the entire community. Pets are still a thing there, but Istanbul’s stray population is the best cared-for in the world. They have their own parks, they’re protected by the people, and they’re even given miniature shelters which famously dot the city of 15 million.

“The whimsical structures — more like miniature apartment buildings than single-kitty houses — can be found in parks, outside shops and cafes, abutting private homes, and on university campuses, providing shelter for the city’s estimated 125,000 strays,” Reason to Be Cheerful’s staff wrote.

Cat house Turkey — A custom-built wooden cat house in Turkey.

The practice of creating shelters for strays and ferals began in 2008, when a young architect named Didem Gokgoz would pass strays in Istanbul’s Mistik Park as she walked to and from work every day.

“Every day I passed the park and saw them looking for a place to get some warmth during the winter, and I felt desperate,” Gokgoz said.

At first she began making small shelters from recyclable materials, but the compact structures weren’t always tolerated in parks and other places where people felt they were an eyesore, so after meeting with the city’s mayor, Gokgoz engaged in an experiment: She built larger, more aesthetically acceptable permanent structures in the park, including one that looks like a large catio with a sloping, house-like roof, draped in greenery and nondescript among the park’s other features.

The Mistik Park cat houses are protected by a catio-like structure. Only volunteers can use the human-size door, while small cat-size openings allow felines access. Credit: Transitions.

The project was a success, and soon she found herself with requests to build more. But they aren’t just built and installed: Each cat house is run by about a dozen volunteers who keep track of the local cats, feed them, get them spayed/neutered and see to their other needs.

Almost 14 years later, cat houses have become a permanent fixture not only in Istanbul, but in other Turkish cities as well.

“It became something normal; individuals make requests for cat houses,” Gokgoz told the Turkish journalism site Transitions. “That was our main goal, and we’ve reached it. Today, everybody accepts that cats must have their own life spaces in the city.”