As an owner of a cat, one of your main priorities will be to train your cat to prevent it from scratching your furniture. This will not only prevent stress for you, it will enable you to form a better bond with your cat.

The first step is to try and understand why a cat will scratch your furniture. It's not a question of your cat not having a taste for your furniture, or that your cat wants to irritate you. Cats simply love to scratch. Scratching is a natural cat behavior, and you cannot prevent your cat from doing this. However you can train your cat to scratch something else, other than your prized furniture.

Scratching is important to a cats health. A cat requires scratching as it helps their muscles. Cats paws have scent glands and scratching helps them to leave a scent in order to mark their territory. Cats need to scratch for claw health and keeping them nice and sharp, for when you annoy it. Obviuosly there are reasons as to why a cat needs to scratch. Instead of preventing this type of behavior, it should be encouraged, although on your terms.

When your cat scratches your furniture, don't even think about punishing it. Cats will not respond to punishment and will increase your cats problems. Punishing your cat will only result in your cat avoiding you in the future. If you shoo your cat away if you see it scratching your furniture, it will only carry on doing the same thing when you are not around. Only by using the right training techniques will you be able to solve your cats scratching problems.

Along with getting a cat, you should also buy a scratching post at the same time. Even better would be to have more than 1 scratching post, as this gives your cat plenty of options. Although a cat can be trained to use a scratching post at any age, the earlier you can start to train your, the better it will be for you, your cat, and especially your furniture.

Try to place the posts in areas that your cat likes hanging out. Placing a post near where your cat sleeps is advisable. A good scratch and a good stretch is cat's first port of call after it wakes up. I think we all share this particular trait. Using a scratching post soon becomes a habit, and your cat will happily continue to use the post in the future.

Another good place to put scratching post, is in an area where you and other members of the family sit. Although cats give the impression that they are not bothered about people, they secretly love spending time with their owners. If your cat chooses to have a nap on your lap, a nearby scratching post will come in handy.

The best way to train your cat to use a scratching post, is to make it familiar to your cat. Get your cat to scratch the post by moving a toy or piece of string up and down it. You could tie some of your pet's favourite toys onto the post, this will encourage your cat to make contact with the post with its paws. These easy techniques will allow you to train your cat so that it no longer uses your furniture for scratching.

Embed the scratching post firmly so that it cannot fall, and make it a reasonable length. Cat training is not difficult if you use the right methods, and it is easy to train your cat to stop it from ruining your furniture.

New! We've just starting a message board and discussion forum over on the Toxic Byte Pets Forum. It's a bit lonely over there at the moment, but feel free to join in and participate!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Cats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.