4 ms·

Is it common for cats to be exclusively indoor?

• rimunroe 3y ago
  Yes? This is certainly common everywhere I’ve lived in the US, though it’s also common to have cats that go outdoors too. I think a majority of the cat owners I know have indoor-only cats.
• m463 3y ago
  is it common for infected rats not to come indoors?
  • CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    It depends where you live. Rats are less common outside the city. There are plenty of field mice and of course still some rats but they generally all stay outside as long as you've kept up with house maintenance. We've had a few rats get into equipment outside our house over the years and probably a few (or squirrels) in the attic but to this date we've yet to see any evidence of one inside the house itself or anywhere the cats could get to them.
  • crtified 3y ago
    In the limited (but probably dominant, here at HN) context of middle-class-ish urban dwellers, I daresay there would be a sizeable proportion of clean, well-sealed modern homes in which rat ingress is at, or almost, zero. Doubtless there is also a significant proportion of homes where rat ingress is more common. But I couldn't begin to speculate about where those numbers might actually fall.
  • rimunroe 3y ago
    We usually have some appearance of a mouse once every couple of years. I suppose it’s possible others are getting in and being eaten by our cats or dog first, but that seems unlikely. Regardless, I believe cats which have eaten infected meat only shed oocytes for up to three weeks post-infection, and usually don’t shed again, so for most homeowners with indoor cats it’s probably a fairly low risk. I believe gardening and playing around in dirt are both far more likely sources of toxoplasmosis infection anyway.