Stop Your Cat From Scratching Furniture

One of the trickiest parts of trying to train a cat is stopping furniture scratching. This is because, by and large, a cat scratches at furniture purely for enjoyment purposes. They like the feeling, and as scratching stimulates their scent glands, it has a pleasurable mix of marking an area and a pleasant physical sensation. Stopping an animal from doing something they love is the most difficult thing to stop; but with cats scratching furniture, it isn’t impossible.

The first and most important weapon in the war against furniture scratching is a designated scratching post. These can be found from almost all pet stores, but you need to be careful about what you buy. The most seen, and often cheapest, scratching posts are largely utterly pointless – they aren’t high enough, nor are they sturdy enough. Study your cat when he scratches at the furniture; he will lean his body against it and arch his back as far down as possible. The small, unstable scratching posts that populate most pet stores make this impossible. As distressed owners purchase them and the furniture scratching continues, the myth of not being able to stop a cat from scratching continues.

A good scratching post actually need not even be a post at all. Try and buy a rectangle of solid but flexible material, or a specific hard-wearing cork board from a pet store. Then, see how tall your cat is and nail the board to the floor at a point they will have to stretch to reach. The wall provides the stability the cat craves, and the height means they can fully extend and get that pleasure boost.

With a replacement scratching place secure, you can move on to transferring your cats affection from furniture to designated scratching place. Try rubbing a citrus fruit or vinegar lightly on the most attacked areas of furniture; all cats intensely dislike both of these smells, and will go away from the area if they sense it. Couple this with aversion tactics; if your cat moves to scratch the furniture, move them to the scratching post. Keep this up for a few weeks, and before long your furniture will become tear free. Cats are creatures of habit, so when the routine of using the designated scratching post is established, you probably won’t have to deal with the issue again.