He doesn’t hate bread, he loves to play with it. This is a game to the cat. You need to make it clear you don’t want him to play. The best thing to do is set the cat up. Encourage him to go there and then give him a squirt from a squirt gun or a loud NO, followed by a swift tap of his butt.
THEN you need to give him something else to do. After you give him the NO, you take him away from the area and give him a mouse with catnip or something in a totally different area.
The cat learns one behaviour is bad and another is good. If you don’t give him an alternative he continues with his fun. Give him an alternative and he’ll give up (evenutally) and do the thing he is allowed to do.
I don’t think so; my cat is allowed on the bathroom counters (she loves to drink from a dribbling tap) but not the kitchen counter, and she’s gets it (and she’s not the brightest cat ever, either).
potential disturbing link don’t want to upset anybody here…
…the link shows a ‘scared off the bench’ Kitty.
People are going to be divided as to whether this is cruel or not, but you could do what this guy does. I lean towards it being overkill… it’s pretty much just a loud and flashy squirt-gun, but I bet it’s effective.
Some good suggestions here. I don’t like th eone about mild shocks though.
Our cat is a persisteant infringer. I look at her & say “no” loudly & firmly & she backs off. & we don’t leave any food out. & she isn’t allowed in the house when we aren’t home or are asleep.
I like the squirt bottle idea. I might get one of those 2.
I’d go ahead and say it’s your fault for naming the thing Typhon. You got off easy with this little quirk, things could have gotten much worse with that name.
I have some big plastic trays I keep in the cupboard and get out when I need a clean surface for food preparation. I gave up trying to keep my cat off the kitchen counters. Actually, he gets up there less since I stopped shooing him off.
Eh, I don’t think it’s cruel. Of course, it cracks me up when I hear the Sscat going off in the hallway and a cat frantically scrabbling away in the night. They’re just startled, and cats are always startled.
That’s what I was going to say about the squirt bottle.
Tin foil worked… for a while. I ended up booby trapping the counter wit mouse traps. I bent the bar up, so no kitties would be injured, it still made a heck of a noise, and may have stung a bit. I only had to set them for a couple of days Afterwords, I would just leave them on the counter. The cat would avoid them whenever she saw them.
Again - I would bend the bar up, so the cat would not get injured.
My girlfriend suggests “She needs to put a lot of citrus scent on the counter. You can either buy orange essential oil, mix 10 drops in a spray bottle and spray it, or you can even eat an orange, take the peel, squeeze it and rub on the counter. Or there’s even citrus sprays that they sell at Target or Walmart, etc. Cats HATE citrus. That other thing with the air spray sounds cruel. I would throw that out.”
I doubt it. Classifying two different surfaces in two different rooms as “counters” just because they’re high up and have sinks in them requires reasoning power that is beyond most cats.
Just yell at him ***really loud ***when you catch him in the act. Yell and stomp your feet and scare the crap out of him . . . and after a while forgive him and make nice. I’ve never had a cat that didn’t stop this kind of behavior.
But I do have one with a special affinity for rubber bands. I don’t even know where she finds them, I just find half-chewed rubber bands now and then. Wish I could catch her in the act.
My cats have a card table in the kitchen with their food and water on it. They are not allowed on the dining room table. The fact that they’re allowed on one table but not another doesn’t seem to confuse them.
I don’t think they understand that both of those things are tables. There’s the card table, and the dining room table, and those are two different things.
What will confuse them, though, is if you allow them on the counter at some times but not others (if you try to keep them off the counter only when your mother-in-law is visiting, for example), or if one person shoos them off the counter but another person encourages them to be up there.
Do try to keep those away from her. It can be very bad if she swallows one- it can get tangled up with her intestines and damage them.
I was going to suggest the sticky tape attached to sheets of paper rather than the counter top. You can move them out of the way when you need to use the counter and easily replace them when you’re done.
