Mountaineering moggy Jasper certainly gets around - Susan Dalgety

Instagram influencer cat Jasper climbs Ben Nevis

Only last month he climbed Ben Nevis with his owner Marley, and regularly goes to the pub with her. He has a more exciting life than I have, and certainly far more adventurous one than our moggy Star, whose routine consists of parading around our back green catching flies for a few hours every day – when it’s not raining - before collapsing on one of his two favourite chairs where sleeps for hours on end.

When he was a kitten, fresh from his birthplace in Bathgate, we considered keeping him indoors, as we live next to a busy city road, but after watching him stare plaintively out the window for hours on end, and enduring his daily zoomies where he unleashed his pent-up energy on us and our soft furnishings, we decided to let him roam free, but only up to a point. He is brought inside around 6 pm every night where he stays until breakfast time the next day.

Most cats are outdoor creatures. They love nothing better than exploring the smells, sights and sounds outside their home. According to the Cat Protection League, the outdoors, even an urban garden like ours, provides cats with an important mental workout.

Star hasn’t quite worked out what birds are yet, thankfully. I dread him coming home on day with a dead robin in his mouth. He occasionally stares quizzically at the pigeons and magpies on our roof, but seems to prefer his daily tussle with flies, and the only ‘gift’ he has brought me from the big outdoors is the occasional twig.

Apparently cats, like humans, need to spend time on their own to recharge their batteries. So when Star is clawing his through the our neighbour’s raspberry bushes or lying on top of my newly planted lavender, he is simply getting away from it all.

But whether a cat is a backyard moggy like Star or a cat with a sense of adventure like Jasper, cats make much better pets than dogs.