Agent of Chaos

My family is trying to make the cats outdoor cats and i am not happy with this

But it is hard to think of solutions because the cats keep pooping outside the litter box and if there is animal shit in your living space, well it is hard to tolerate that

There have been repeated incidents of the kitty door leading to the cats litter boxes being locked or of recycling bags piled up against the door so they can't get in, which is part of the problem

update

two of the cats have been outside for about a week, they haven't really left the immediate area of the house much unless following one of us and they cry to be let back in a lot. Emmy seems to enjoy running around and having "zoomies" when one of us is outside in the yard with her, but when she's alone she seems to always hide in the yew bushes.

Mostly the anti outdoor cat argument is that they kill wildlife and are invasive in most of the world, and I am very worried about my frog pond and the birds and other wildlife I have been seeing return to the yard, but I am much more against outdoor cats because most outdoor cats I have known either died gruesomely or "disappeared" within a couple of years.

Like for about 10 years when I was growing up we had a cat colony on the back porch that we couldn't get under control because spay at vet clinics was $200 a cat and TNR programs in the area had a nine-month waitlist.

Over a dozen, probably 20 or so, were "pets" at one time or another and lived part-time indoors. Only a couple of them made it to 7 years old. The two oldest cats we ever had died of respiratory illnesses at 8 or 9. Altogether there had to have been well over a hundred cats and most of them "disappeared" before becoming 3 or 4 years old. A lot of them were run over by cars and killed, there were multiple more that were badly mangled by cars and had to be euthanized, I remember finding one cat under a bush still alive with her guts hanging out of her, another time we came home to find a whole litter of kittens mauled to death by a loose dog. They were always sick and full of parasites and wounds from fighting other animals. My sister is the most in favor of keeping the cats outdoors and honestly I think it's because she's too young to vividly remember these things.

I've been in college most of the time we've had these three cats so I don't think I've bonded with them very closely really, it just bothers me that cats are culturally considered so disposable, and I think it might be why I have a hard time bonding with cats, the ones I loved so much as a kid kept disappearing and I knew most of them had died in miserable, painful ways.

There's this sort of mythological story a lot of people tell themselves that cats "come and go as they please" and when a cat "disappears" it is off having "adventures" or some twee bullshit like that. Even the Warriors series acknowledgements says something about one of the authors cats that "left to become a warrior." People decide that just because they didn't see the dead body, their cat didn't die, it just "left." This is such a silly story for grown adults to be believing.

As i'm writing this, the coyote pack is wailing and howling outside...

it seems to me that the litter box problems are probably caused by a combination of the following: