How To Stop Your Cat From Clawing Your Furniture
- Why they do it
- What not to do
- What to do
Cats Must Scratch
About everyone who has a cat has bewailed the shredding of their sofa or armchair. Long threads wave out from everywhere and you wonder ‘what will the guests think’? Bad Cat!
Cats need to scratch, and will. It can’t and shouldn’t be stopped.
Bad cat? Nope. Cat. Scratching fulfills at least three feline needs. They need to stretch; they are driven to leave their scent and they need to groom their nails and because they don’t have a better option they choose our furniture. So, what do we do about this? We give them a better option. Scratching trees. Cats have scent glands on the pads of their feet and they feel an instinctive urge to press them against objects, and people. Whether or not they know they are leaving their scent we leave to wiser folks to say, but that they are, and feel the impulse to do it is certain.
Cats also love to stretch – some of the original yoga poses we use and practice were derived from observing cats. And, they need to groom their nails. They need to pull off the outer sheaf and give a tone-up to one of the most vital aggressive and defensive weapons in their arsenal. That they are ruining our furniture is a side issue, and to them, not an issue at all.
What Not To Do
As stated above, your cat isn’t being bad when he scratches your furniture – he’s being a cat. He has no intention on hurting or angering you, he has nothing against your furniture (well, his paws) and it is a basically wrong approach to think of his scratchng as anything other than a necessity. So abandon the idea of punishment or even strong deterrents, like spritzing them when they scratch your sofa.
If you spray your cat with a squirt bottle when he claws your sofa he will not make the connection between the natural behaviour he is enjoying and getting doused. He will only come to mistrust you and stay away from that location when you’re there, and you won’t always be there. He may begin to stay away from you altogether. When you’re not there he’ll do what he wants.
A cat should never be punished. If he is being a problem it is because he has a problem. Here is a post on that. Above all do not declaw your cat! ‘Declawing’ is a misnomer and that practice should be called ‘detoeing’ because it is not simply removing the claws, it is ten amputations of the last digit of each toe of the front paws. It is horrific and one of the cruelest things that can be done to a cat. Not just because it is painful but even more importantly, because it makes his life so much more difficult and unnatural to go around without claws.
How To Save The Furniture
As with many such things, a multi-prong approach is best, all together, not in succession. Let’s say your cat is scratching the side of your sofa. Put some not unpleasant to you but unpleasant scent to him on the sofa, such as citrus. Avoid commercial chemicals. Who knows what’s in them but there’s a good chance it isn’t good. As an alternative to putting a scent, lay a piece of plastic, a double sided tape or some other material over the target area – something he won’t like to or can’t get his claws into.
At the same time, put a good quality scratching post right next to the sofa where he scratches. Probably no cat on the planet would vote against a sisal rope cat tree or cat scratcher so long at it is tall enough for the cat to reach up and stretch and stable enough not to wobble. Sisal rope will last pretty much forever and gives just the right amount of resistance and tooth. Cats love it.
The scratching pole or tree being tall enough makes stretching, which cats are so good at and so like to do, a genuine and needed pleasure and so long as it is weighted enough and doesn’t topple or begin to, you cat will feel entirely at ease.
This is one part of the solution. When you do this, try to be there and encourage him to the post. Pet him, rub some catnip on the post if he likes catnip, (they say about one third do), and draw him to the post, away from the sofa. If your scratching post is also a cat tree, encourage him up it but do not force or frighten him. That would be counterproductive. If it’s a cat post with platforms you might want to hang a favorite toy or two (of his) from it to entice him over there.
If you see him using the post or tree, give him a treat. Unlike a dog he will not associate using the post with being treated but it will help create a positive relationship to the post.
Once he has formed a positive relationship to the post and uses it often you can experiment with where to place it. For more on this, and to learn more about the many kinds of cat trees, please See this post.
Continue to keep the citrus scent or material on the furniture where he scratches until that habit has atrophied and you’re home safe, so to speak.
And Yet Another Alternative
After sending the newsletter with a link to this post a customer contacted us, thanking us for informing people about declawing. She said one of the best purchases she ever made was this cat scratching post from Sofa-Scratcher. She told us her cats (seems she has several) love it and use it ‘with gusto!’