Help! Our kitten (now a juvenile) Lightning is having his first Christmas here at home. I set up the tree a couple weeks ago in front of my bay window, which of course is one of his favorite perches to watch the world go by.
For awhile he didn’t molest the tree. He has an alternate route onto the windowsill around the tree via the TV stand. But lately he’s taken to using the tree to climb up to the window, bending the (artificial) branches, knocking off ornaments, etc. It’s really starting to bug me.
How do I keep him out of it? Any tips from you cat-loving Dopers out there?
I’ve had cats all my life, and have never been able to keep a single one of them from messing with/climbing up the Christmas tree. One of them even ate half the cotton “snow” wrapped around the base one time.
I briefly considered shooting the thing with my son’s airsoft pistol, but I can’t bring myself to do that.
Besides, I can’t ever catch the fucker doing it! I just picture him on my counters where I prepare my food with intentionally poopy-infused paws rubbing them all over the countertops thinking “fuck yo couch, nigga!”.
When our old cat was a kitten, she was always knocking ornaments down. For three years running, we just gave her her own little stuffed ornament and she was happy. She particularly loved a small stuffed teddy bear and would carry it with her everywhere. She also liked to nap under the tree.
My mom put tons of functional bell ornaments on our tree to serve as an early warning system. The cats learned to associate the bells ringing with someone yelling, running over, and maybe pulling out a spray bottle to squirt them, so ours, at least, eventually learned not to climb the tree.
Second solution: give in. My feeling on cats after living with them for 20 years is that if a cat really, really wants to do something, nothing you can do will stop it. It will just do it when you’re not around. My parents have a cat who likes to climb the tree and after several years of squirting it with water and then coming back to find the same furry face sticking out of the top of the tree, they started just putting the tree up with no ornaments and letting the cat have her fun.
Damn. I opened this thread because I thought you might have some tips! I’ve had cats all my life, and I don’t know the answer.
Bell ornaments can’t hurt, and a squirt gun works if you have someone staking out the tree 24/7. Our family went without a Christmas tree for four years after getting our youngest cat, who is now eight, and even now we have a stripped-down version. No tinsel, no icicles, and no breakable ornaments on the lowest two feet of the tree. The only reason we get away with having anything higher is that we have an artificial tree and the branches won’t support the cat’s weight.
And we can’t have ribbons on the presents, either. Our cats run our lives.
Our cats would climb the fake tree, but leave the real tree alone. My friend’s cats climb the real tree, but ignore fake trees. What kind of tree do you have? Perhaps next year get the other kind and see if that helps. If not, learn to live with it.
There is, or was, a product called something like Pssssst!, which is a combination of a motion sensor and compressed air. Supposedly, you place the can around the area which you want to be cat-free, and the compressed air emits a hissing sound when the cat approaches. This startles the cat, but doesn’t hurt it. Theoretically, this will teach the cat to avoid that area.
Realistically, some cats are too damn stupid to learn any such thing. And [del]some[/del] most cats are too damn stubborn to let a little hiss bother them.
I figure it’s hopeless with a stubborn Siamese not long out of adolescence (she’s two years old). This is why we don’t have a tree this year. I hope she’ll have calmed down a bit by next year.
This is how my family knows a present is from me - chewed bows.
I have no solution other than the Squirt Bottle of Doom. We put unbreakable ornaments on the bottom half of the tree, which has kept Dot entertained. For the most part, all three leave the tree alone, but have forgone their waterbowl for the water in the tree stand.
Outside of the squirt bottle (which is a losing battle if no one is there 24/7), we used to strap the each leg of the stand on top of a 20 pounds weight (old weight bench bar weights) to keep it from falling over, and hang non-breakable ornaments near the bottom.
Today we just have a 4 ft fiber optic tree with only a few unbreakable ornaments on it, and the cats have so far ignored it.
