untrainable

[flamingjune07]

I used to be able to get my cat to quit doing stuff (and run away, and look kind of shocked, in that cat way) by squirting her with a squirt bottle. That's what you're supposed to do, right? Well, she's gotten used to it -- now, she just squints, looks annoyed and holds her ground, lets me squirt her, and then spends the next five minutes or so

Comments

[scentedwoods]

annablume uses canned air pretty effectively!

When were trying to do some behavior modification for my old kitty, the vet said to add a touch of vinegar to the water in the squirt bottle.

[flamingjune07]

Yeah, she really doesn't like air blown in her face, but it seems to aggravate her, and if she doesn't run away right away, she sticks around and keeps doing it but now she's pissed. The water was great for a little while because it just sort of surprised her and warded her off, but now there's this...

Vinegar sounds like a good idea, except that me and my kitten get pretty cuddly sometimes, and it would kind of suck if she smelled like vinegar? (As it is, she smells like a cat, but like, a nice-smelling type of cat, heh).

[scentedwoods]

It's just a teeny touch of vinegar -- enough to annoy a kitty's delicate sensibilities. Not really enough to make her small like a salad!

[flamingjune07]

Haha, ok, will try it then. Thanks for the tip :)

[flamingjune07]

if she starts gnawing, maybe grabbing a cat toy and redirecting her attention would lessen her interest in your ankles.

Heh, I did that -- now she gnaws on me whenever she wants to play :P I like that we have a sort of "communication" going on there, but not so much that it involves teeth. Argh.

[scentedwoods]

Ha! Oops.

[degeneratemite]

For the furniture scratching: You could get some mesh or aluminum foil and cover her favorite spots to scratch with it. Mesh will snag her claws, which she will hate, and aluminum will make scratching there completely unpleasant for her. You could also just get a scratching post and put it in front of her favorite spots. We have stubborn cats at my house and we usually just try to block their favorite scratching spots as much as we can. If you really want to just STOP HER in the moment, a whistle might work. But cats brains don't work like our brains or dog brains. They have a hard time understanding why you're squirting them or startling them. They might know that sometimes, when she scratches, you do something she doesn't like. But cats aren't great at making the connection that you are doing something she doesn't like because she is doing something you don't like and the way to avoid the thing she doesn't like is to stop doing the other it

[scentedwoods]

Cats need to scratch and if they don't have an appropriate place to do it, they'll pick wherever they feel like it.

I have a scratching post right next to my couch. One cat always uses the post, one cat always uses the couch. Grr!

[degeneratemite]

It could be because the other cat has marked it -- cats have scent glands in their paws, marking is part of what they're doing when they scratch, maybe he'd used one if he had his own?

[flamingjune07]

I did the scratching post thing too and now she just scratches them both. There's basically no getting her off of the couch, without actually putting something on the couch itself to make it impossible, which I should look into.

Re: predatory/play behavior -- we think she's about 2, so maybe she'll calm down. I will say that she seems to love it when I have one or two other people over and we're all paying attention to her; I feel bad because it seems pretty obvious to me that she's sort of an extroverted cat, and I have her cooped up here in my little one bedroom with just me when she'd rather be exploring a much larger space with more people/animals/etc in it. When I move to Atlanta, hopefully I'll be able to get a shared house type situation that will be cheaper for me and more interesting for her :)

[nietzschekeen]

Andy discovered that most cats (including yours) hate the smell of cilantro. He kept some to shake his roommate's cat away from his bed at one apartment. Maybe mix some with the water?