Nope! Just decided to be a disappearing asshole for 36 hours and come back like nothing happened.
edit: thanks to all for the different perspectives. he is fixed, has all of his shots, and has his own temperature contolled kitty condo (aka the laundry room) that we put him into every night. we have a pretty good network of neighbors and pieced together his activities via security cameras. he's a mouser for sure and that is his job until he decides to retire.
Are you suggesting we should let cats free-roam because they'll escape and do so anyway no matter what? Or that leashes serve no purpose because some cats refuse to move in one?
I've literally never had this problem, with leashes or otherwise. Not that my particular cat almost ever goes outdoors even in a leash, he hates the outdoors. I live in a city and the bustle of everything around scares the shit out of him.
You don't need to walk a cat in the first place, they'll be perfectly happy with play sessions indoors, being ambush predators that even in nature get their exercise in bursts and resting most of time. Going outdoors is something you can do with a cat, not something you have to do, like with dogs.
What's your point? Aside from the fact that you either don't know what a proper cat harness looks like or how to put one on.
I'm saying a cat that has a leash on is as dangerous to be outdoors as if they didn't have one. The "not moving part" what I meant is when dogs or cats refuse to sometimes move for reasons. They'll be stubborn about it and "stand their ground". With a dog, you can kinda pull on the leash / vest. If you do that with a cat, you pull the leash off, and they'll go running if something spooks them (or are just assholes).
Cats should be kept indoors all the time if possible. It's extremely risky to walk them.
Don't be condescending. I know what a "proper harness looks like". Just because you didn't encounter this problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
A cat on a leash outside is FAR better than one without one.
Some people will insist on taking their cat outside, and some cats will insist on going outside. If this is the case, leash them.
Obviously, if you can't keep it on the leash, something you can and should find out before going outside, don't.
It's like you aren't reading my comment at all and just saying what you want. You can't keep a cat on a leash, period. They can get out of it at any time. They can squeeze into any hole that is their head size. Well, guess what size the hole for their head is in the cat harness.
Apparently I need to explain cat harnesses and how to secure them.
Cat harnesses don't hold the animal by their neck. The neck loop is only there to prevent the abdominal loop from slipping back so the cat can't slip forwards through it.
The part that makes a cat harness secure is the abdominal strap, which needs to be so tight around the cats abdomen and up against their front legs, that the cat can't pull backwards through it.
This together makes the harness impossible to slip out of either forwards, or backwards.
If you have cats slipping out of harnesses, they are either incorrectly designed, (for example, the connection between abdominal and head loops can be too long, allowing the head loop to be escaped, and thereby allowing the cat to pull its ass through the abdominal loop) or you didn't set the abdominal loop tight enough.
Like talking to a brick wall. No. That's not the case. There is no such thing as a harness that makes it "impossible to slip out". There is no engineering that can make the cat stay in it when it doesn't want to. Go and actually check it on the internet. Plenty of people with tight, well fitting, "correctly" designed harnesses, and the cat just falls through them like nothing. If still stubborn, show me a cat harness that is impossible to escape.
This has got to be the dumbest hill to die on but please keep going lol.
Yeah I probably won't simply because the herd mentality here is not worth my time. I doubt any of you had any experience with harnesses, if not with cats at all.
100% I’ve never even seen a cat much less successfully harness trained two of mine.
First of all, harnesses work to some degree. They aren't perfect but that doesn't mean they don't work at all. I used one on my cat so many times, and he's only almost gotten out of it once.
Secondly, regardless of a harness working or not, that doesn't excuse letting your cat outside all willy nilly, still dangerous.
I'm advocating the exact opposite - don't walk your cats on harnesses and keep them indoors.
That's fair enough, better to be safe than sorry. If anything, having a nice catio would probably be better.
Alright, I've looked it up, there is no such thing as a completely escape-proof cat harness.
Does that make me agree with your apparent stance of "no cat should ever be allowed outside in a harness, ever, because it's the same as letting them free-roam" ?
No.
Harnesses are perfectly secure way to safely taking most cats outside. Obviously, if you're dealing with an escape artist, stop doing that.
You just checked that they aren't escape proof, and then you say it is perfectly safe. No it isn't. A cat doesn't need to be an escape artist. They can get spooked, they can see pray, or decide the harness is just not comfortable to them. I specifically was talking about them pulling back on it (which you can't really prevent 100% of the time) like in this video here https://youtu.be/gvfqXeKrfbQ?si=GiDGG1SdkIo1vkgI
You're going to have to do a lot better than a video clip and proving that any harness can be escaped to convince me that their use is no better than allowing a cat to free-roam.
The mere use of a harness already shows the cat-owner does not want their cat out an about on its own. If it pulls it off they aren't gonna go "oh well, it'll come back when it comes back" the way outdoor cat-owners do.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/gvfqXeKrfbQ?si=GiDGG1SdkIo1vkgI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.