A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out.

Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.

That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.

If you’ve ever had a cat that is adamant about trying to escape you might feel differently.

Yeah like “back up from door” not “poor baby just wants to be free.”

> That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.

Have you? I never came across a cat that prefers rain and cold over dry and cold (and pillows and food). But the most cats in houses or apartments I have seen come in and out as they please through specially built doors in roofs, doors or windows.

> A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically.

And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?

Modern house cats are semi-mostly domesticated. They are accustomed to house life and communal company as much as humans are. Same goes for domesticated canines.

Your entire comment screams of a PETA ad warning about cruelty to ferrets without realizing that domesticated ferrets literally can and will not survive in nature in 99% of cases. Their "wild" instincts are gone. Cats aren't nearly as helpless, but are similarly co-evolved to domestic life.

What difference would a house make here? A yard?

I have a 3-story ADU (yeah, it’s weird) with access to a forested area behind.

One day Seven of Nine might be eaten by a raccoon but I’ve seen the GoPro footage, she has a blast every day of her life. As a side-effect benefit, she doesn’t play games with me because her entire world is filled with games she can play herself. We still sleep curled up together though :)

cats hate stairs

I've had cats that love stairs. They'd play and slide down them on purpose.

Pretty sure cats love climbing things, and stairs are no different.

I lived in apartments for a long time then moved into a house. I thought my cat who had never seen stairs would take some adjusting. Nope, he look up them, wiggled his butt, then ran full tilt to the top. Ran full tilt down them too.

One of our cats has arthritis and before we got her treatment she didn’t like them, but she’s perfectly happy now.

so you probably never had cats that run up and down stairs 10 times at 6am.

Carpetedness may make a big difference in this case.

But then you did get one?

Yes. After buying a house with a yard, a pool, and a few trees.

Apartment is no good for a cat but suddenly fine for you? It isn’t like it is in human nature to live in a shoebox either. Human nature is to live in the sahel, sleep under the stars, forage, and track game. The office and the apartment is genuinely a prison for the human in their evolved element.

Yes but I can leave whenever I want.

Can you? Leave in the middle of every work meeting next month and see what happens.

You are not arguing in good faith. A work meeting is a commitment I made of my own volition and is only possible because I /can/ leave my apartment.

I’ll throw it back at you, maybe if you left that meeting you would find that it had less consequences than you are imagining.

The only one who is arguing in bad faith are the ones equating a cat chilling in an apartment to some form of slavery.

How do you go sleeping under the stars when it’s below zero, blowing its guts out, and snowing.

Look at how much hair is on your skin, you aren’t meant for that. You are meant to persistent hunt game and forage in fairer weather. You are optimized for that. Everything else is compromised, swimming uphill only bailed out by happenstance technological affordance.

What, so ants, bees, wasps… they’re allowed to built shelter from the elements.

But when humans do it’s unnatural?

And besides, if you saw how hairy I am you’d probably reconsidered your opinion.

it's funny because domesticated cats have much more developed frontal cortexes than their ancestors & it would be one of the things that feral cats lose to genetic drift (meaning, no conservation pressure in the wild). whatever boring stuff we have them do is apparently extremely mentally taxing compared to the wild.

Social interaction may take more mental capacity than hunting and surviving?

they also need to understand human behavior a little bit I guess, & that's pretty complicated (so not just social, social of humans specifically)

"Your Pet Cat Has a Smaller Brain Than Its Wild Ancestors"

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cat-brains-have-sh...

more developed frontal cortexes

And smaller brains

Aren’t mutually exclusive

Yeah it probably shrank as it developed

It’s for the best, house cats torture the birds and frogs around here and I hate it. I never knew frogs could scream.

And generally just tear through native populations of birds and small mammals. I honestly think it's irresponsible to have outdoor cats in places where they're not native (which is effectively everywhere).

It depends.

My indoor-outdoor cat only catches small animals if they run between her paws. But she did chase a rather large raccoon around the house once, as I did.

In my suburban neighborhood, we occasionally have coyotes. They are known to prey on fat cats (the feline kind).

My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.

I also feel that small wild cats were likely native everywhere. Birds were probably not their primary prey; small reptiles and mammals, i.e. animals that don't fly, nest in trees, or live in flocks.

> My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.

It’s just something we’ve all been told all our lives, with the people doing the telling never point to any evidence to back it up.

Even when cats are wild and native, their hunts aren’t particularly successful, except the desert sand cat[1] which is so small it would perish if its hunts were low rate success.

And if you watch videos of collar cameras on cats, they seem to spent all their time doing a perimeter check, having a quick social interaction with other cats doing the same, and maybe brushing up against a frigidly neighbour human.

The idea that a house cat that has warmth, food, water, bedding, would bother to waste time killing small birds and mammals that have hardly any meat on them anyway is fairly unbelievable.

Feral cats are a different story. But don’t blame responsible cat owners for that problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_cat

I had a neighbor once that had 2 cats. The only thing they seemed to care about was catching birds and chasing squirrels. They only caught birds but they did catch them often. Many cats are exceptionally good at catching mice and bringing them back home. Some seem to enjoy torturing them. Also in some countries like Australia they absolutely decimate the native population if left unchecked, and that’s according to actual data about the presence of cats and the level of wild animals.

As an Australian living in Australia..

I was at a wildlife sanctuary in Tasmania, about 50 minutes drive from where I live.

The tour guide said something like: every year 250,000 native animals are killed every year on Tasmanian roads.

And I just blurted out: and they just keep coming.

Because, obviously, if it was a problem then that number wouldn’t be sustained. It’s kind of self evident that the deceased animals free up resources and territory for the living animals, who then go on to have more offspring.

I feel the same about cats: if they were a problem for the native fauna, we’d expect that problem to have auto-resolved by now, as in the cats would have killed all the native fauna.

But, like all environmental problems, it’s perennial: the problem always needs more funding, more restrictions on human activity, increased red tape for developers, and home owners who want to manage their land. Like you can cut a tree down until after it falls on your house and kills your infant.

Again, I don’t believe it’s well fed house cats that are allowed outside that are the problem, it’s the ferals that need to kill to survive.

And there are ways to solve that problem, or at least greatly curtail it.

There was a prize-winning photo of a lynx doing that to a rat, a few days ago.

https://petapixel.com/2026/03/24/wildlife-photographer-of-th...

Then further down the page, "A sika deer carries the interlocked severed head of a rival male that had died after their battle". Nature, eh.

Sure but housecats aren’t nature

They're totally doing that same lynx stuff, though. They're not not nature.

Yeah but we’re not artificially inflating lynx populations because we think they’re cute…

That's an Iberian lynx. They were nearly extinct around the year 2000, but since then they've been reintroduced and relocated and nurtured with rabbits until the population grew 20 times bigger. Cuteness is not irrelevant to that in my opinion, but anyway it exists because humans decided it should, because it fits our idea of what nature would have done if we hadn't already interfered. Therefore ... it's OK that we arranged for it to be there torturing a rat, I guess. But it takes the edge off the guilt about domestic cats somewhat. The whole thing ends up being a battle about taste and aesthetics in the giant wildlife park we've inadvertantly created.

Except there are like 600 million cats worldwide..

Sure, but now we've strayed far from the starting point which was that cats are bad because they torture small animals. In fact most animals are bad. The question becomes which animals do we want around the place.

That tracks for sika deer. Those are the "sacred deer" that used to be venerated in Nara, and are still protected under Japanese national treasure laws. They are allowed to roam free throughout Nara, and you face big penalties for hurting or messing with them. You are allowed to feed them special deer crackers which local shopkeepers sell, but woe betide you if a deer sees or smells deer crackers on your person! You will be followed or chased, and may be at risk of being gored on a buck's antlers, until you give up the goods. They're attitude on four cloven hooves, those deer.

Life sucks. I bet the 10s of 1000s of animals used to source the protein in your cat food had a great life though

They eat crickets funny enough. Anallergic. And as animal production goes the crickets seem happy enough.

Cats have completely deleted the rabbit populations in a lot of suburbia. I feel like it got worse around 2020 for some reason. I had to move to the middle of the woods to start seeing them again.

Is there somewhere rabbits aren’t a problem for humans?

They’ll devastate anything farmers intend to do.

They’re public enemy number one here in Australia.

Got lots of rabbits in my town, on a tiny nature reserve beside a footpath that goes from some office complexes to an industrial estate. It's ten minutes walk from the houses where people keep cats. I guess all those fluffy neutered cats have dedicated their attention to actual cat food and to the sport of infringing on the territories of other cats, and just aren't very rabbit-centric. If the cats were feral and breeding the rabbits might be in trouble.