Keep Your Fucking Cat Inside
I am stridently anti outdoor cat. If you want your cat to get time outside, build it a catio or train it to walk on a leash. Cats being outdoors and allowed to wander is dangerous to the cats, humans, and other animals. Cats are an invasive species that make wonderful pets but should under no circumstances be allowed to wander freely.
Keeping an outdoor cat is neglectful of your cat. Feeding a feral colony without providing veterinary care, spay/neuter, and vaccination is animal abuse.
Dangers to your Outdoor Cat
House cats are a domesticated species. They are not a wild animal, and while they may resemble some wild cats they are not the same. Your cat is not adapted to live a life outdoors, it is not adapted to live a life outdoors in your area, and it will not just 'be okay' or 'figure it out.'
Other Cats
This page exists because someone was stupid enough to comment on my blog that "cats mostly don't fight to the death." And is true that cats rarely will kill one another with traumatic injuries during the course of a fight. However it is also true that cat bites are the primary way that Feline Immunodeficiency Virus is spread, that cats who fight are often subject to abscessed wounds because of the specific structure and bacteria of cats' mouths.
- Cat fights can cause sepsis, killed one third of cats in a study about identifying and treating it.
- Abscesses can occur in the brain, and though this is rare, it is because adult cats fighting sometimes bite so hard that they can leave tooth fragments in their opponents' skull. Some fun findings from these studies show that cats who are treated quickly for abscesses in their brains often recover full neurological function, when they survive, so I hope Mr. Whiskers is able to make it home in time for you to take him to the vet.
- It can often be difficult to identify injuries from cat fights for up to a week after the fight, which is why some vets have worked together to make a wound diagram that shows the kind of harm that cats are likely to do to one another in a fight. The long-term consequences include things like "their pleural cavity filling with pus" and "loss of extremities," so this paper is not for the squeamish.