Cat in the Window

© All Rights Reserved

© All Rights Reserved

Someone has developed a bad new habit. Last year, my cat was a small kitten during the summer months when the windows were open, and grew toward adult size during the winter, when all of them were closed. Today I opened a few windows to let in the refreshing warm air. When I came into this room, my cat was in the window like this, but I had no idea how he got up there. With a little patience, I finally observed what he was doing. He's climbing/clawing his way up the lower window to perch on the upper part. He has already done this in all of the open windows he had access to.

There are several problems with him learning this new "trick." For a cat, he's not very nimble. I can foresee him falling forward, into the screen, and out of the window to the outside. He is a strictly indoor cat, and wouldn't know what to do if he found himself outside. He isn't declawed (I think that's barbaric to do to a cat), so he has his defenses, but there are coyotes around here. He doesn't have a collar, because I keep him inside all of the time, so if he got lost, anyone finding him wouldn't know who his owner was.

So now I find myself considering my solutions to this problem. I need to guarantee he can't get outside. At a minimum, I might need to get him a collar with a name tag.