Nighttime Safety for Outdoor Cats
Reflective Cat Collars for Better Visibility
With dogs, you should always put an LED collar on them for walks in the dark, but that won’t work with cats. LED collars have to be manually turned on, meaning you’d have to see your cat before it gets dark to turn on their collar.
If that’s the case, you might as well bring them in for the night (seriously, it’s significantly safer for an outdoor cat to at least stay indoors after dark).
However, there are still some collar options that will help your cat stand out better to drivers at night if you really can’t bring in your cat at night. When shopping for a nighttime collar for your cat, look for one that includes a wide band of highly reflective material that you can be sure will reflect the light.
Like these:
In addition to being reflective, these breakaway collars can sometimes be safer than regular collars on cats. See below for the benefits of "breakaway" collars.
You may also find “glow-in-the-dark” collars, which can be OK for nighttime visibility when they’ve been “charged.” But they aren’t always dependable, as the “glow” needs to charge in the light for several hours, and even then it can deplete rather quickly.
As with any cat collar, you want to find one with a break-away latch. Cats tend to squeeze into tight spaces and can easily snag their collar and strangle themselves trying to get away. A break-away latch can help ensure that the collar will pop off rather than harm your cat.
GoTags makes a good reflective, break-away collar with custom identification information stitched right into the material.
Make Sure Your Cat is Microchipped
Since your outdoor cat has a break-away collar for safety, you need to have a backup source of ID in case their collar comes off, along with all of their identifying information.
It’s always a good idea to have your cat microchipped — whether they’re indoor or outdoor — with up-to-date contact information, in addition to the ID information on their collar. If your cat is already microchipped — first of all, yay — know that the process of ensuring their information is correct and traceable can be more complicated than you might think. Here’s a detailed overview for how to keep your cat’s microchip up to date.
What Your Cat is Really up to at Night
When not dodging cars or other nighttime hazards, you might be interested to learn what your cat is probably doing while the world sleeps.
The only way to know for sure is to stick a camera on them and review the footage. In fact, researchers from the University of Georgia (UGA) did just that, strapping cameras to 55 outdoor cats in Athens and reviewing their nighttime antics.
The researchers (and the cat owners) were surprised to learn that the Athens outdoor cats preferred hunting small reptiles and amphibians, or small local mammals (voles) over mice. What’s more, the cats’ hunting wasn’t what you might call productive. The monitored cats left behind about half of the animals they hunted (meaning they killed or severely injured them and left them to die), only ate about 28 percent, and brought home about 23 percent.
Check out this UGA page to view photos and videos of these cats.
