One Cat, Two Cats

Cat containment isn't discussed nearly enough in New Zealand.  When it comes to talk of managing cats as predators, in this land of birds, the options are usually listed as - no cat, cat kept indoors (full-time or at night), or free ranging cat.  But there are great options for keeping your cat happy, active, with access to the outdoors, and safe from traffic and fights. Containment can take many forms, and doesn't need to be difficult or particularly expensive.  Importantly, this is an issue that doesn't need to revolve around predation, it can improve cat welfare and be a real win-win-win for our environment, the cats, and the community (including cat owners with lower vet bills, and no missing cats). Getting Started: The Design Issues Getting started is the hardest step by far.  If you've never seen a cat fencing option, or been with contained cats, it can all seem just far too hard. Where do you even start?  Surely cats are just too hard to contain? There

Sometimes getting out of bed in the morning is just too hard!  Noomi sleeps in the bed, at night ( yeah, I know the don't let your cats in the bed, blah blah blah),  despite having quite a number of cat beds to sleep in, and sometimes stays put when I get up.  On this morning, I physically evicted her, and got quite a bit of loud complaining about the unfairness of this.  A few minutes later I came back down to check she had actually moved, and found the drama queen making her point.     Life is hard when you're a cat.

There's so much nonsense out there about any animal training, that it is no wonder that people cannot fathom how to train a cat.  First, cats are generally solitary animals, so even if all the hierarchy training BS had any validity, it wouldn't work on cats. But also we humans are often obsessed with punishment (which is also part of the hierarchy alfa animal BS - the 'alpha' myths).  We, lazily, wait till things go 'bad', and then focus on how to stop (correct) something we don't like.  Not really training at all if you think about it, and incredibly stupid on our behalf - as if the animal is some sort of mind reader that 'knows' what we want. How often do we hear someone say 'he knows what he did wrong'.  Hint, nope he doesn't, or he wouldn't do it.  Bigger hint, how on earth could an animal 'know' if you didn't teach it what you do want.  That 'knowing'  look or body language is in response to your voice or b

Noomi does not like change. She has a rather strange way of showing this, growling, howling, and hissing loudly and aggressively - at Lily.  If pressed, she runs away, grumbling and growling all the while.  Lily, is pretty immune to these displays, as if she knows that they aren't properly aggressive.  I'm glad she does, it fools me.   The latest incident was when I was about to go into hospital, and my sister had arrived in the house to look after me when I came out. Ann has her own cat.  Both cats were perfectly fine, until nearly bedtime when they managed to get into the guest bedroom.  Then Noomi lost her mind. A few minutes earlier the pair had been snuggled up together on my lap, now Noomi was a growling, hissing maniac. In the end I had to let her escape into the yard overnight (it's fenced, but I normally have them both in at night).  This nonsense carried on for several days.  Lily being the more mature of the two, Noomi growling and grumbling whenever

We have a whole family of cheeky blackbirds, possible a couple of generations now, who have my yard as their territory.  This includes the very valuable food source of cat biscuits (kibble) that are sometimes supplied around the outdoor walkways for the cats to 'hunt', and the food bowl that used to be placed in the laundry.   Well? You gonna help me, or what? I say 'used to' because the laundry door was always left open for the cats to come in and out, and the birds quickly learned to do the same.   The cheeky sods were always a feather's breadth from being eaten, much to Noomi's displeasure.  They learned to sit on the gutter, look for where the cats were and then pop in for a feed.   If the bowl wasn't there, or if they got nosey, I would occasionally find one wandering into the hallway, and once one got trapped by an incoming cat and made it's 'escape' into the lounge...causing all sorts of excitement. So, it was not alto

The cat fencing had restricted the cats to the backyard, so I started to build new runs into the front yard area.  The initial walkway has proved very popular. 

I had purchased a bunch of floating shelves with the intention of creating cat friendly climbing walls.  BUT, I had a real problem getting floating shelves on the wall. I just could not get the hang of the ones I had purchased.  Then I found the, rather expensive, but specialist screws for floating shelves and voila! suddenly I was on a winner.  I still wasn't convinced that they would withstand the weight of cats leaping about on them, but at least I could get those damn shelves out of storage.   I put them up, planning for no cat access, assuming they would rip half the wall out and come tumbling down, with whatever ornaments were in them if a cat did leap on them.  But the cats knew better.  I did hold my breath as Noomi, the flying lead brick (she is a true Tonk and weighs twice as much as she appears to), gave them a test run. Much to my surprise, they were steady as a rock.  When Lily, literally half Noomi's weight, gave them a trial I had no doubts they weren