Hi JBarstool. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
It's healthy to have different perspectives. We have different experiences and, as individuals, qualitatively different perceptions due to sensory processing variances, even before we add cultural lenses.
The lack of study into other impacts on vulnerable species is one of the things that saddens me. When it comes to observing sparrows and kookaburras driving off, harassing and harming other birds, that is all I have to go: observations and feelings - my own and those of whom I may talk to. Wouldn't it be nice if someone did the research to find out the facts?
As long as I am dependent on feelings (visceral sensations, emotive surges and psychological hunches) to inform me of what is happening around and within me, and from which to construct meaning via reflection, I can only rely on these to tell me that my cats need the time I spend outdoors with them to be fully happy. It's a kind of communication. A shared sense of joy. Just as your experience tells you otherwise. And just as you find it so unpleasant to encounter kitty crap where it shouldn't be. But I am curious. I live in a relatively wild and thinly populated area, but even when I lived in suburbia, I never found issue with cats leaving excrement underfoot. In my experience they always bury it. When I walk outside I can step in... hmm... let's see: possum, pademelon, wallaby, or quoll scats, but I have never stepped in cats'.
Back to cats indoor/outdoor. A few rainy days pent up inside and the despondency in my tribe is palpable. Behaviours indicative of maladaptive stress responses (destructiveness, overgrooming etc,) rise. There are a wide range of cat toys and furniture to make life indoors more stimulating, and depending on the cat, these can go a long way to alleviating stress, but in my experience, nothing can substitute for time outdoors. I don't want to impose unwanted feline interactions (or excrement) on my neighbours, and I don't want to expose my cats to potential harm, so creating some kind of cat-proof barrier between their place in nature, and my neighbours', is the obvious solution. Then kitties can have the best of both worlds.
In my view, a purely indoor life is not enough. I doubt there's anything anyone could say to convince me otherwise - that's a strength of conviction that has no truck with reason. Perhaps your conviction to the opposite is likewise seated. That's ok.
But my experience of nature is enriched by sharing it with my cats, and I can't deny their ecstatic expression when rolling in leaf-litter and dust, or zooming up a tree with claws buried in real, living bark, so I feel both my cats and I win when we're outdoors together.
