A catio can improve a cat’s personality. This is my opinion and I’ll explain why. I remember visiting and staying at the home of Helmi Flick years ago. She is one of America’s best-known cat photographers. Her photos illustrate the cat breeds on this site and are all over the internet nowadays because copyright has been ignored on the internet.

A catio improves a cat’s personality

Like many Americans she keeps her cats inside at all times. She has a garden but the cats don’t visit it. There’s a large patio sliding door which leads out to the garden and one day she opened it leaving a large space for the cats to walk through and they just looked out at the garden and didn’t move an inch. It was as if there was a glass barrier between them and the garden.

Obviously there was no physical barrier stopping them visiting Helmi’s large garden which they would have enjoyed but there was a mental barrier. When you keep a cat indoors all the time they see the outdoors as something which is an unknown and potentially frightening. The domestic cat exercises caution when venturing out into an unknown space. Arguably, full-time indoor cats can become timid because their life is closed, cosseted and quiet. They don’t have the usual encounters which train a cat to be confident. They lack the usual stimulation from nature. Perhaps more confident cats would have walked through that space into the garden.

Timidity in a cat is a personality trait which is not as attractive as confidence I would argue. Although there has to be a balance between the two, confident cats are more likely to be interactive and enjoy life more fully. In general people prefer confident cats.

Building a catio, as this lady says in the video, has made her Maine Coon more confident. He has shed some of his timidity and she notices that he is enjoying life more. Her catio is quite small but allows a domestic cat to feel the wind through his whiskers, to smell the air. A domestic cat can get a lot of enjoyment out of nature’s smells. They are stimulating. And then there are nature’s sounds. They can all be enjoyed more intensely in a catio.

Nice video – nice catio

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