If you are anything like me, you like to let your house cats play outside. This can carry some risks to it though. House cats can get into all sorts of trouble outdoors if you are not careful, and they generally don’t have the same hardened approach to life that an outdoor cat will already have. Due to this, it’s best to let your indoor cats go outside in a controlled environment, if possible.
How can this be done? How about building a patio for your cats?
All that a patio for cats is, really, is an enclosed patio that is designed to let your cats lounge comfortable outside. What cat doesn’t like to get out into the fresh air and sleep in the sun and watch what’s going on in the neighborhood?
You can probably already start to visualize in your head what would make for an interesting cat patio. The cats will need structure to lounge on, and you will need to keep in enclosed as fully as possible.
There is a good writeup over at Catster right now about how somebody built a cat patio, and the challenges they ran into during the process are pretty insightful.
The catio became a favorite hangout for my four rescue cats and so I was very upset when I discovered that Nemo was getting out on a regular basis! It was quite a while before I realized it, because he always let himself back in each morning by scaling the outside of the kennel fence, running across the roof and jumping down into the catio! The cats were banned from the cattery, unless under supervision, until I could identify and plug the escape route.
I recommend reading the whole article, it has lots of great insight and pictures, and can help you get prepared to build your own cat patio.
