Catmo: A Story of Containment

As I have recorded elsewhere, we live in a city with a strict leash law, a law that includes not only dogs but also cats. And one of our neighbors has a long history of zealousy trying to enforce that law. As soon as we moved into the neighborhood, we were welcomed by neighbors bearing cupcakes and goodwill--and warnings about the neighbor across the street who keeps a humane trap just for cats who wander into her yard. Wanting to keep the peace as well as comply with local law enforcement, we restricted our cats to our house and backyard. This worked well for a few weeks as the cats familiarized themselves with their new home, but then our male cat, Pluto, discovered that he could scale the wooden fence, and he began prowling the neighborhood in the evenings and early mornings. Of course, our pet-less neighbor has a yard that all the neighborhood cats--those that I see free and prowling in the evenings--love. Inevitably, Pluto headed straight for her yard.

Our next-door neighbors have an invisible electric fence around their front yard, and most of their cats wear collars that apply an electrical zap when the cats approach the perimeter of the yard. We thought of putting in a similar invisible fence around our backyard. However, Pluto has managed to pull off every collar I've placed around his neck, and our neighbors' cats have learned that if they run really fast, they can get past that invisible monster with a minimum of hurt. So occasionally even those cats wander to our pet-less neighbor's yard, happy to dig around in fresh dirt and pine straw.

Looking on the Internet for other ideas on how to contain terrorist cats, I discovered websites of companies selling "cat-proof" fences or attachments for the tops of pre-existing fences. I thought we could contrive to make our own, and so we purchased chicken wire, which Tom and our son stapled to the top of our wooden fence. Well, that contained Pluto for several weeks. The other two cats, both females, had made no attempt to escape the backyard except through the occasional unguarded open gate or open front door.

The months flew by; the cats seemed more content to stay home in the winter. But then spring arrived--and a phone call yesterday morning at 7:15 a.m. Our neighbor across the street was calling to complain about Pluto's visits to her yard, about the cat poop and the dead bird she found in her yard last week.

"I have lots of birds in my yard," she said, "and this morning I heard them clucking. When I went outside, I saw your cat." She went on to describe how she believes that all urban and suburban cats should be kept inside their owners' homes. The cats are a menace to birdlife--and to the peace of mind of people who hate encountering scat in their flowerbeds and home gardens. She was angry and near tears. I was sympathetic. I, too, have a home garden in my front yard which is being fertilized by neighborhood cats (the young cats next door who haven't been wired yet for their invisible fence). I assured her that we would try a different method to contain Pluto, the terrorist cat, to our backyard.

Although we had initially meant to have only one cat, our daughter's cat Odyssey, the two black cats, when tiny kittens, had been dumped in the country when we lived in Harris County, Georgia. One had been viciously damaged; the other was hungry. We took them in, and now we are a three-cat family when we meant to be only a one-cat family. We have lived with those cats for eight to six years now; at times they were indoor cats, at other times indoor/outdoor cats. But we've never had the issues with the cats that we have here. Dogs will stay in their fences; terrorist cats are more difficult to contain. And, of course, we love our animals, even the recalcitrant ones, and we want them to be comfortable and happy.

So we have continued to "Catmo-ize" our backyard. This morning, Tom installed a one-wire electrical fence along most of the wooden fence in the backyard. He left one leg of the fence free, from the garage to the gate, because Pluto doesn't seem to scale that part of the fence (there's a dog on the other side of that fence, too). With chicken wire on top and the electrical wire mid-way up, perhaps this set-up will finally contain our cat.

But I want to tell our neighbor that even with this one cat contained, others leave their yards in the dusk of the evening and the pre-dawn morning--even when their owners have the best intentions of confining their cats. Cats slip out front doors in an unguarded moment. They scale fences, find holes behind the shrubbery. And though the cats may be completely contained, other dangers lurk. Hawks fly into our backyards, hunting for tiny mammals and birds. A hawk nests in this neighborhood. I've been six feet from it, almost eye to eye, when it flew in, chased by smaller birds, to perch in our black locust tree. I've watched it sitting quietly for long minutes on a neighbor's gate to a shady backyard, listening, looking. Even squirrels eat birds. And this neighborhood is over-run with squirrels.

No, there is no way to be perfectly safe, to be perfectly free of animal scat and the musky scent of mammals.

Update: It took Pluto an hour or less to figure a way out of the recently electrified backyard. He is now confined to the house until we figure out how he is escaping Catmo. We're glad he is neutered. Otherwise, his descendants might be a threat to our own species!