I have mostly succeeded in keeping the claws off the furniture with a combination of methods. The main one is the Soft Paws claw caps mentioned above. You’re going to need an assistant and an old sheet or towel, but once you get those suckers on, you’re golden (for a few days at least, while Gray Boy gnaws on his toes).
Second thing, find him something to scratch that he prefers to your furniture. This is a little pricey, but it’s working for my cats. It’s covered in sisal fabric, not the rope, and they also sell fabric scraps if you wanted to make something yourself. I believe it’s best if you can provide something vertical, so the kitty can stretch.
Third, buy some no-scratch spray at a pet supply store. With this combination of methods, you ought to be able to train the kitties away from your stuff.
I used these on my cat when he was a kitten and they worked beautifully. They are a little hard to put on the first time, but if you have someone to help you hold the cat it’s not impossible. A much better alternative to amputating the cat’s fingers, IMO.
We use SoftPaws on our one kitty that’s not de-clawed. They work well but you have to be fairly diligent because even one claw uncovered will damage furniture (you should see my sofa) and they don’t all fall off at the same time. The scratching behavior is still there but the covered claws don’t do any damage.
It only takes a couple of minutes to put the claws on. My daughter has developed a method where she doesn’t need an assistant. But you really have to check for missing claws almost daily and replace the caps.
My couch is really in bad shape because we are not terribly diligent about keeping the soft paws on him but then, we haven’t tried to stop him from scratching either.
A friend of mine once told me something that helped me a lot. It was that if you have pets, just get your mind around the fact that at any given time, about 30% of your stuff will be in various stages of destruction. Expectation is all. It helped me look at the stuffing from my arm chair in a whole new way.
We gave up on keeping our smallest cat from scratching the chairs, so we dug up a really ancient and non-functional office chair and designated it her special scratching chair.
They’re allowed to scratch that chair, the carpet and their post and that is all. Anything else gets an immediate yelling and possibly a chucked small object (depending on who catches them scratching). Now they only scratch unapproved things when they’re ticked off at us.
Aaaaaaaaaand on preview, I’ve noticed I forgot to say how we got the smallest cat to stick to one chair. Every time we caught her on an unapproved spot, we’d issue a loud “NO!”, pick her scrawny little self up, and plop her on the approved chair. When she scratched the approved chair, we didn’t do anything at all to stop her. She picked it up fairly quickly.
Thanks a lot for all of these awesome suggestions guys! I definitely want to try a couple of these methods before I do anything extreme like declawing. I’m particularly intrigued by the soft paws although I’m worried I may come out of it with a number of fresh scraches :eek: . The cat repellent spray looks interesting too, I didn’t realize that they made stuff like that. Looks like a trip to Petco is in order for me.
We have a strictly indoor cat and tried everything to limit it’s scratching; multiple scratch pads, squirt waterbottle, repellent, clipping nails, etc. She still was scratching, both intentionally on the nice furniture and unintentionally on my daughter’s arms, shoulder, etc.
Two days ago we took her in for a front only declaw, in part on the advice of my F-I-L, a veterinarian. I played with her last night and it’s as if nothing happened at all. She doesn’t limp, is frisky, friendly and was swatting at the feather toy and pouncing just like she always had.
Maybe surgeries are different now but I swear she appears absolutely no worse for the experience whatsoever.
Well, I have no answer to the OP - the cat I just inherited has no claws and he’s my only cat experience. I just had to say that this guy:
is so stupidly cute I can’t even stand it. He looks so…distinguished. I hope you figure something out. FWIW, as I said, Schatzi has no claws and seems to get along fine without them. He still kicks Voltaire’s ass with no problem. (Voltaire is my dog).
A cat without claws cannot defend himself in fights with other cats. His dexterity may be compromised, climbing fences, trees, walls…
Our toenail-trimmed indoor WHITE cat used to come back muddy and bit up when he used to escaped. The first time he escaped after we stopped cutting his nails, he came back pristinely white!! :eek:
Cuervo is the first cat I’ve ever had that I didn’t front-declaw. I just wanted to see how things worked out.
He’s doing fine, and all the furniture and carpet is intact. He has one of those tipping over cheapie scratching posts, but he LOVES it. He also has the cardboard thing in a box (I don’t know what it’s called, but he loves it, get thee to Petco).
Things he’s encouraged to scratch on get occasional catnip, but mostly they have his little paw-scent on them I think (musk in the pads??? cat smart people help me here, paging SCL… ).
Places he’s DIScouraged from scratching get Feliway sprayed on them once every couple days. I got the stuff originally for a TOTALLY different purpose, but it does work somehow to stop him scratching there. YMMV.
Also, I took a couple roughly 2 x 2 carpet remnants and dropped them around the house, every so often rubbing some catnip on them.
I hope you figure something out. FWIW, as I said, Schatzi has no claws and seems to get along fine without them. He still kicks Voltaire’s ass with no problem. (Voltaire is my dog).
The first time he escaped after we stopped cutting his nails, he came back pristinely white!! :eek: