About 13 years ago, my fiancée and I started to go for walks in our neighborhood. When we’d step out of the house, cars often lingered at the intersection out front a bit longer than they should have. People would stop us to ask questions. And the patrons of a restaurant across the street framed by large, plate-glass windows would occasionally run outside and shout, “It’s you — we’ve heard about you!”

Perhaps this wasn’t so surprising. We were walking our cats, after all. On leashes.

We weren’t trying to start a movement. And we weren’t the only people in the country who had the crazy idea to buy a small dog harness, strap it onto a nonplused feline, and pray that the tens of millions of years of evolution that separate dogs and cats would suddenly evaporate. We just wanted our two kittens — Jasper and Jezebel — to experience more of the world than our cramped 800-square-foot apartment in the heart of Baltimore. We also wanted to keep them from running out into traffic.

[The Opinion section is now on Instagram. Follow us at @nytopinion.]

In the past two decades, there has been a growing movement to confine our feline friends indoors. Veterinarians argue that this significantly extends their life spans, protecting them from disease, cars and predators. Wildlife advocates contend that outdoor cats are a blight on ecosystems, killing countless birds and small mammals every year. Increasingly, it seems, no one wants to cross paths with an outdoor cat.

Yet cats belong to a proud race of savanna kings and nomadic carnivores. Their ancestors slunk out of the deserts of the Near East 10,000 years ago to hunt mice in our early villages, and they have been free to roam our backyard jungles since. They have not evolved to slumber in our living rooms.