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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.

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If you’ve ever had a cat that is adamant about trying to escape you might feel differently.
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> 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.
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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.
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Yeah like “back up from door” not “poor baby just wants to be free.”
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> 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?

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What difference would a house make here? A yard?
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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 :)

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cats hate stairs
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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.

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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.

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Carpetedness may make a big difference in this case.
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so you probably never had cats that run up and down stairs 10 times at 6am.
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It’s for the best, house cats torture the birds and frogs around here and I hate it. I never knew frogs could scream.
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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).
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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.

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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.
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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.

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Sure but housecats aren’t nature
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They're totally doing that same lynx stuff, though. They're not not nature.
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Yeah but we’re not artificially inflating lynx populations because we think they’re cute…
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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.
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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.
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Life sucks. I bet the 10s of 1000s of animals used to source the protein in your cat food had a great life though
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They eat crickets funny enough. Anallergic. And as animal production goes the crickets seem happy enough.
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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.
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Yes but I can leave whenever I want.
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Can you? Leave in the middle of every work meeting next month and see what happens.
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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.

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The only one who is arguing in bad faith are the ones equating a cat chilling in an apartment to some form of slavery.
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But then you did get one?
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Yes. After buying a house with a yard, a pool, and a few trees.
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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.
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"Your Pet Cat Has a Smaller Brain Than Its Wild Ancestors"

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

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Social interaction may take more mental capacity than hunting and surviving?
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they also need to understand human behavior a little bit I guess, & that's pretty complicated (so not just social, social of humans specifically)
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