Before I am deluged with hate mail from all you cat lovers out there I have to declare I I too am a cat lover or long standing. I have kept cats for most of my life and have been fortunate to have had many good experiences with our feline friends.
There is one BIG but here. Now that I don’t keep a cat I have got used to the freedom from responsibility that goes with pet keeping and also from the understanding that animals, and cats in particular, are very independent and also not very fussy about where they go to the toilet. Now when I was a cat owner my cats never spent a penny (or worse) in our garden. Clearly they went off and did their business elsewhere and so, I never worried about it.
When my own cats had sadly died (both at a fine old age of 17 in both cases) I suddenly found myself on the receiving end of unwanted feline attentions! Yes, with regular monotony some roaming moggy would deposit a large “message” slap bag in the middle of my lawn. Now most times I would spot this and with some revulsion manage to remove it (why are these messes often too loose to handle!?) from the grass before I found myself on the receiving end of sprayed droppings when I had missed the “message” and mowed it with my rotary lawn mower. I shudder at the vivid recollection of this smelly experience even after a 10 year gap.
To combat the cats that were doing this to me I spent a small fortune of a variety of chemical, so called repellents. Sonic devices that the cats treated with utter disdain, simply wandering around the outer edges of the garden having somehow worked out the range of the particular device I had fitted. In one miraculous event I saw next doors cat slide over the fence like a reptile rather than a cat and after a short bit of reconnaissance “Bob” literally “bunny hopped” over the invisible beam!!! £25 down the drain I muttered as I tossed the useless kit into the bin. Mind you the first time I had installed it Bob’s first encounter was truly awful (for him) judging by his blood curdling caterwaul. He certainly worked his way around the thing thereafter.
One day discussing my massive expenditure anti cat measures someone suggested to me that they had heard that if you filled several 2 litre clear plastic bottles with water and placed them strategically around your garden they would somehow deter cats from visiting your garden all together. I viewed this suggestion with some scepticism but decided that it may be worth a try and given that it was free of any further expense, why did I have to lose.
Well, three bottles of water placed in the garden later, not a cat to be seen.
Success!
PS:
I have now had to employ this practice again now that one or two cats have been calling here to stalk the birds that feed here. Not while I am watching they wont be.
Any other NON LETHAL ideas would of course be welcome. Please feel free to post your ideas in the comments.
1 comment:
Wow, I'm really surprised that works! I only get next door's cats in my garden and, because we seem to make more of a fuss of them than their owners do, they tend to not do their toilet in out garden. But I'll pass the tip on to my mum, who'll no doubt be pleased to try it out.
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