In my series of reviews on cat products, I’ve gone over the fun toys, the fancy robot litter box, and the basic supplies. So now we’re on to the not-so-fun parts of owning a cat. Sometimes all cats, even my sweet Benny, do things that you don’t want them to do. Scratching furniture, climbing on counters, testing gravity with something fragile – cats know how to push your buttons.
Unfortunately, cats can’t easily be trained out of these behaviors, which leads us to cat deterrents. I actually didn’t have much luck with most of these products (except for the last one!). So read through and learn from my mistakes, or purchase for yourself and see if your cat is just better behaved than mine.
Water spray bottle
The idea with using water spray as a cat deterrent is that the cat does not like to be wet, so if you spray the cat with water, it will learn to stop doing what it was doing by avoiding being wet. The problem is that cats don’t really work like that. You can read more in depth about it here, but essentially the cat will begin to associate the bad thing (water) with you, unless you happen to make sure that the deterrent happens every single time the cat does the bad action. Which, I don’t know about you, but I’m not watching the counters or kitchen table 24/7.
Before we really read up on the situation, we tried this for like a week or two and honestly had better luck with just yelling “NO” and clapping loudly to get Benny to jump off the counters. So try using a water spray bottle if you really want to, but I would just move on and try something else.
Air spray
The PetSafe SSSCat Spray Pet Deterrent attempts to fix one of the problems of the water spray bottle from above. It removes you from the equation and guarantees that the negative response will happen every time the cat goes somewhere he shouldn’t. It essentially works by strapping a motion sensor to a bottle of canned air, which will spray out at your cat when it’s detected. Seems like a good concept, so we tried it out.
And it works, kind of. The problem is that the motion sensor is way too sensitive. If we put the canned air on our bookshelf, it would spray out air when we were walking across the room, at least five feet away from the apparatus. Which wouldn’t be that much of a problem except if it’s going off every time my husband or I walks into our living room, the canned air runs out exceptionally fast. And you can’t just use any ol’ can of air, you have to use the specific brand’s refill can and they’re like $15 a pop. So suddenly you’re paying $15 a week for something that sprays you just as often as your cat.
So it’s a good concept, but I can’t get behind the execution or price point of this specific product.
Herbal spray
Nature’s Miracle Herbal Spray uses a variety of essential oils that cats do not like, to create a cocktail that you spray over an area that you don’t want the cat to be. This way you’re not actively spraying your cat or leaving anything out in your house, you’re just spraying your house with a smell that is fine to you but your cat will avoid.
Honestly, this just straight up didn’t work for us. I sprayed it on our counter, I sprayed it on paper towels and placed the paper towels places. Benny did not care at all that the scent existed, he still went wherever he pleased. Don’t waste your money.
Double sided tape (and placemats)
This one is a bit of a lifehack. First, the Polarduck Cat Training Tape is a large format double-sided tape. It turns out that cats don’t really like the sticky feeling on their paws (I mean, I wouldn’t appreciate that either), and they will avoid sticky places. So the tape is perfect for putting on the places your cat scratches, or that you in general wouldn’t like your cat to go.
For whatever reason, our cat Benny hates one specific chair in our living room. He’s never scratched anything else except this chair. We slapped the training tape on the edges of the chair and Benny hasn’t scratched it since. So it definitely works on soft surfaces.
Another pain point for us is Benny jumping on our kitchen counters and knocking everything off. The problem is that I don’t really want sticky tape permanently on our counters. So that’s where the Vinyl Placemat Set comes in. By putting the tape on the placemats, you can easily shuffle around the areas of your kitchen that are sticky, allowing you to cook with ease.
It’s not a perfect lifehack, and honestly we just kind of gave up at keeping him off the counters. The placemats work great, but it’s still a lot of surface area to cover all of our counters with tape-mats. The tape does eventually get kind of gross with dust and hair and it’s a lot of effort to be finding places for all the mats constantly. So I would recommend the tape for any soft surfaces that your cat scratches – for hard surfaces, the placemat hack is worth a shot to see if it works in your home. Maybe you’ll have more energy to invest in placemat organization than I.
Mighty Mug
This one is for when all of the above fails and you’re at your wits end. There is no cat deterrent on Earth that will prevent Benny from knocking over a can or glass, especially one still filled with liquid. I was so frustrated at having to clean up spills that I was legitimately looking for an adult sippy cup. And those do exist, but that wasn’t necessarily the vibe I wanted to give off in my day-to-day life. But then I stumbled upon the Mighty Mug.
The Mighty Mug looks like your basic insulated coffee travel mug, but has a suction cup on the bottom. In the promotional video, it literally has a cat attempting and failing to knock the mug over. So I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, at worst it would be just as successful as anything above.
Luckily, the Mighty Mug works as promised. If you firmly place it on a flat, horizontal surface, it will take an incredible amount of force to tip it over – much more force than my cat is willing or able to exert. It takes a bit of getting used to the exact movement you need to stick/unstick the mug for easy drinking, as you have to vertically pull up the mug every time, but it wasn’t that bad of a learning curve. The Mighty Mug isn’t perfect – if you push it enough, it will unstick and spill everything. But it has been enough to prevent cat-related accidents.
I also just love it from a travel mug perspective. It’s double-walled so it will keep your cold drinks cold and hot drinks hot. The lid has a full 360 degree drinking surface, so you don’t have to make sure the mug is facing the “correct” way before taking a swig. The button to engage or disengage the drinking mechanism is easy to use. I really have no complaints about it, and I have taken to drinking pretty much everything out of it the last several months. Water, soda, wine, tea – absolutely everything! And it’s fairly easy to hand wash.
Verdict – Cat Deterrents
Unfortunately the verdict is that most cat deterrents didn’t work for us, or are cumbersome in some fashion. I can really only recommend the two-sided cat tape, and even that is annoying because it always needs to be present. Does something work for you and your cat? Please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, you can find me sipping out of my Mighty Mug.
