Brand new furniture becomes trash in months. Gotta mop up streaks when she decides to hide behind the couch and not drink her water. Get woke up in the middle of the night when fatty decides she didn’t eat enough.
I could sit here and type for a hundred years and not even come close to airing out my frustration. :p
God help me.
Put scratching posts (both vertical and flat) near the areas where they are doing this. Redirect when you see them doing it in the wrong spots, and you can get sprays to make certain areas more/less attractive for scratching. They also might want more play time. Scratching is normal cat behaviour but there are ways to give them healthy ways to practice it.
If you’re buying one with rope, buy one winded vertical and one with horizontal winding. Mine hates the horizontal ones, but then absolutely loves vertical windings.
In the cat’s defense, the furniture appears to be made of foam.
Get a scratching post, or a sacrificial chair maybe?
It appears to be made of foam because she has spent 7 years wearing it down.
I can hear the pain in your voice through the comment lol. Gotta love the fur balls so much, but man it comes at a cost sometimes.
Because we love em!
Scratching in the “wrong” places tends to be either from frustration, or a lack of stimulation/appropriate places to scratch.
You probably already have some scratching toys/mats/spots, but try experimenting with different orientations; attached to a wall, 45 degree angles, those wave pattern ones, not just straight flat on the ground.
Also, try different materials. Some cats love that rope, others want cardboard, and some are very picky or want both.
If your cat is overweight and leaving streaks or not drinking enough, you should talk to a vet, ideally making an appointment with a nutritional specialist. It may be they are allergic to something in their food, causing intestinal upset. If that’s difficult, you can also simply try giving pouches of small gastrointestinal wet food and seeing if that helps.
It may also be because they are too fat to clean themselves properly, and they butt-scoot to clean it that way? You can get special diet food that fills them but doesn’t have as many calories.
When our new kitten decided her favourite scratching post was the doorframe outside the bathroom, we went ahead and bought one of those hanging scratching mats to nail over it.
Saved the doorframe, and have a happy kitten.
beavers… you have a beaver.
give it a tree trunk ffs.
wow
Teach them not to do that, for starters.
I have sprayed her with water, ran her off, put up scratching posts right in front of it, only to look over and see her scratching around it.
What others have said. With regards to diet and drinking - look into raw feeding.
Has there been any conclusive study that shows raw feeding actually helps anything- and more importantly, helps enough to overcome the very real risks involved?
I’ve been raw feeding for over decade. The health of my cats massively improved. The ones that have been raw fed right from the get go are the healthiest I’ve ever been owned by. One of my cats, the vet said was the “most beautiful specimen he’s ever seen” (yes he used that terminology lol and all my cats are just mutty rescues) and said he was incredibly healthy.
I’ve gotten more food poisoning from supermarket food than I ever have off raw cat food, which is to say never in that time. We use a high quality local business that specialises solely in raw feeding.
With regards to research, just bear in mind that the pet food industry is a multi-billion dollar industry with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. There’s also plenty of evidence to show that, as an industry, there’s a lot of dodgy stuff going on and that its causing huge health issues for pets, including deaths. I believe there’s been several documentaries on it but I haven’t looked this info up in many years.
I’ll edit this with some studies once I’m on my PC and not my phone because it’s annoying to do with a phone keyboard.
