Should we transit our cat into an outdoor cat?
We have two cats that are the same age, but my inquiry is for my grey cat, Luna. History-wise they have been indoor cats their whole life. We lived in apartment buildings for the first 4yrs of their life in Toronto before we made big leaps to move to the UK late last year. We've also had them as kittens.
In our days living in apartments, Luna was exposed to hallway walks (supervised), our other cat could not be bothered by this. Luna can also be easily harness trained. She picks things up quite quickly and is very treat motivated. We always had floor to ceiling cat trees and multiple wall perches to food puzzles and cat scratchers for enrichment. Luna however never found this to be enough. She always wanted to be in hallways and building staircases and no matter how long you are out with her it was just never long enough. I'm talking between 5mins- 25mins. She will exhibit a behaviour like constant meowing to get out which only gets increasingly louder and more obsessive. I have roommates at one point where they also have to walk her just so she stops meowing. That was our experience in apartments.
Now that we moved into a house in a country village neighborhood estate, with a decent fenced garden, We thought it would be good for both our cats to have an added enrichment. So far we are only allowing supervised yard access when the weather allows.We started with 2-5mins out and slowly increased the time based on individual cats' confidence. Our other cat, was shy at first but eventually learned to pace her excitement and would come back into our conservatory when she feels shes had enough garden time. And shes happy to be let out when we let her. We think hallways were not her fave because people come out and she's more reserved in nature. Luna on the other hand, started exhibiting new behaviour on top of the constant meowing, she would start pacing and turning around a foot stool then watch the garden door and repeat the behaviour, which worried us after reading on obsessive behaviors in cats, and we decided to take a break from letting her out. After maybe a week from the break the obsession would start to die down. But there have been times where she bolts out, gets a taste of being outside and then the obsessive cycle begins again.
This does worry me about her fulfillment. I always feel I am short of giving her the life she deserves but we are not sure how to go about this we started exploring letting her out 3 months ago. I do also want to mention that after the first time we experienced her obsessive behaviour, it took 2.5weeks for her to settle from meowing every time we are in the living room (the door to the garden is glass and its in this room) and we attempted different ways to redirect her obsession from different online sources. One said if she kept meowing to calmly let her out of the room and only letting her have access when she stops meowing for at least 30 secs (that was really difficult) personally it is also distressing for me to constantly hear her meowing and scratching at doors. We also did 2 more attempts of exploring how we should reintroduce garden time to her all of which ended the same way. Which has been discouraging.
Although in our new place we have yet to add wall perches, I don't feel confident that this will help distract her as back in apartments this wasn't enough.
TLDR: Are we distressing her more by introducing outside or should we be looking for other approaches to letting her out?
We are open to getting gps tracker collars just the initial phase seems to be challenging.