Indoors or Outdoors?

This is a great way to pick a fight on some Internet forums, but that's not my goal here. We're getting ready to launch a series of pieces on walking your Bengal, and I wanted to start off with some background on where we're coming from.

I grew up in farm country. Our cats came and went as they liked and we didn't even have litter boxes. But as an adult I've lived in more populated areas, and I've always kept my cats inside. The reason is that, of all the cats I had on that farm as a kid, not one died of old age. In fact, I only knew what happened to one of them, who managed to get hit by a car in front of our house. All the others simply went out one day and never came back. To my mind, this isn't a good thing.

I know there are a lot of people who hate the idea of cooping up a cat inside because they want to be free to explore and hunt mice and all that. Even in the densely populated, semi-urban area where I live now, a lot of people let their cats roam. On my more or less daily walks through our neighborhood I'll see them curled up on front porches, or darting across the street in front of me. They seem content.

But I also can't take that walk without running across a new spate of "missing cat" flyers - each with photocopied pictures, plaintive descriptions and tear-off phone number tags - up on the light poles.

He wouldn't have caught that chipmunk anyway. Damn thing was just too smart for him.

Once, when I was in college, I actually found someone's missing cat. I saw a strange cat hanging out in some bushes near the library one day. The next day, he was still there. Then, on my way home, I came on a missing cat flyer on a light pole, and darn if it wasn't that cat. So I got my wife and we took the car back to campus, picked him up and got him back to his owner.

That was one. But it's never happened since. You know almost all of those cats aren't going to be coming home, and it's sad. Between the traffic, other cats, free-roaming dogs and even wildlife species that have adapted to scavenging human trash, it's a dangerous place out there for a cat.

My last cat, Max, lived eighteen years and died peacefully at home with me to take care of him. For my money, that's a better deal all around. He wouldn't have caught that chipmunk anyway. Damn thing was just too smart for him.

So Leela - especially Leela, who on top of all these other factors is valuable enough to be worth stealing - stays inside. But we'd read that Bengal cats are easier to leash train than regular cats. And so we tried it. Over several upcoming posts, I'll talk about how we went about that, how it worked, and how you can get strange looks from passersby too...