Keeping the cats inside

I’ve inadvertently raised two very bold and brave kittens, as Tie and Scampi have started to wander downstairs where the big dogs spend most of their time.  Just five pounds each, the cats are quite bold with the 100 lb. dogs, and every day I see them venture further and further through the house.  I’m starting to fear that “further” is soon going to include venturing out the doggie door.

Do any of you have the same problem, and if so, what solutions have you used to keep your cats inside?  Right now I’m thinking of two possibilities—installing “cat fence” around our yard, or installing one of those radio-controlled doors which only open in response to a special sensor on a dog’s collar.  I’m not thrilled by the latter solution because I’m afraid the dogs would still try to charge the door, as they’re used to doing, and one of them will eventually end up with a concussion.  The cat fence solution isn’t perfect either, because our huge yard would probably need about $1000 worth of fence to totally contain everything, it wouldn’t keep the cats away from the pool, and it would still allow the cats to escape under our main gate.

I’m just not sure how to approach this problem, and I’m especially worried about any of the cats sneaking outside and getting into the front and the busy street.  With Eli being older and not able to hold her bladder as long as she used to, it’s not practical for me to cover the doggie door when we’re not home or at night, either.  What I may end up needing to do is to figure out someway to prevent the cats from going downstairs at all, as the stairs are a direct “feng shui” link to the doggie door—it’s like following the yellow brick road.  This would be okay as our upstairs is still very large and there are plenty of rooms for the cats to explore, but it just feels wrong.

Anyway, if you have any other solutions, please let me know!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/26 at 11:13 PM

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  1. I wish I had some good ideas for you, but I don’t. I know people have built big outside cat habitats…I have some friends with a large porch. They screened it in, and their five cats can slip through the window and sit on perches in the porch to watch the birds. They rarely use the front door and go in & out the garage, so the cats are pretty secure.
    Can your cats actually get through the doggie door? Maybe you could make it heavier or something so they can’t force through.
    My cat Elvis has been an outdoor kitty most of his life before moving in here. He does spend most of his time inside, and goes out with the dogs. Cute to watch the little cat hanging out with the Rottweilers, he clearly thinks he is one of their pack.
    I don’t like that he jumps the fence and goes for little wanders, but it would be virtually impossible to keep him in and he’d be miserable. He is savvy and the street is quiet, with some big empty treed lots so I don’t worry TOO much.

    Posted by Carina  on  05/27  at  04:32 AM

  2. After you basically solved all our pet problems of the last few months, I am going to fail you totally. Our kitty is very keen to go outside but there’s only one dog and no dog door, which means we only need to keep the door closed. (Which is actually harder than it sounds when unloading groceries or when the kids are going in and out.)

    Best of luck, though.

    Posted by Diana  on  05/27  at  05:22 AM

  3. I have one cat (Sassy) who has been in her lifetime a fantastic escape artist. She figured out the construction of one apartment we lived in to where if she got into a hole in the wall, the kitchen cabinets, or the basement, she could get outside. I had to safety latch the cabinents, block the hole in the wall, and deadbolt the basement door. I was very happy to move out of there.

    We don’t have a doggie door mainly because of her, although our dog would love it.

    Baby gates at the head of the stairs will only work for so long. One gate will work for maybe two weeks, and then they will learn to jump or climb it. You are looking at installing a door at the head of the stairs. How practical/possible is that? The other possibility is confining them to one room when you aren’t home and cannot supervise where they are. No cat will enjoy that, but if you start while they are young, they can get used to it.

    If I confine Sassy in a room, she claws the door and does damage to the floor in front of it. She has also learned that if the screen door doesn’t latch, she can used her weight to open it. If she ever learns to stretch and use a paw properly (and I have seen her try), she’ll be able to open the door. She also loves being tied out in the yard (since I don’t have a cat fence), but she has learned to back out of a cat harness. Her head is so much tinier than her body and her body is also fatter than the shoulders. She only goes out supervised, but she still really really wants out. She wants to be an in/out cat, but I prefer her in only and safe.

    Posted by georg  on  05/27  at  06:37 AM

  4. I don’t have a helpful suggestion, either. Finnovar has never expressed the slightest curiosity about the outdoors. Apparently he read somewhere that it doesn’t have central heating & air, and he wrote it off entirely at that point.

    But I was wondering about something so I thought I’d mention it. If you went with the sensors on the dogs’ collars, considering how totally fearless Tie & Scampi are, I wonder if that would solve your issue or if they’d just time it so they could run out WITH one of the dogs.

    Also…this is sad to mention…a family on our block has lost their black toy poodle. There are signs everywhere, miles and miles around, offering a $1000 reward. I thought someone had stolen it because there’s been no sign of a, er, flattened poodle, but Alan has another theory about why no one’s seen her (or remains): a hawk lives somewhere nearby and has been spotted often during the past few weeks. This hawk has at least a 5-foot wingspan, no exaggeration.  I’d never presume to tell anyone else how to care for their pet, but traffic isn’t the only danger to the littler fellows - at least not in Georgia.

    Posted by Helly  on  05/27  at  08:34 AM

  5. In the past, we’ve solved this problem with weighted doggy doors.  The dogs were strong enough to get through, but the cat was not strong enough to push the door to get through. Perhaps test something like that out? The dogs may get a bit confused at first, but considering their size, they should be abnle to handle a weighted door significantly heavier than what the cats could manage to push through.

    Alternatively, you could put a scat mat underneath the inside of the door.  Hopefully, the dogs are large enough to step over the scat mat and exit the house but the cats would be small enough to have to hit the scat matt to get close enough to the door…the scat matt would give them just enough of a jolt to scat them away from the door.

    Hope one of those suggestions might help.

    Posted by prajantr  on  05/27  at  11:24 AM

  6. If Eli needs a dog door, then I don’t know any other solution than to equip the backyard in such a way that they either can’t get out, or won’t want to try. 

    For initial discouragement, you could put a brace of wire on top of the fence so if they climb up there they won’t have anything to grab, and perhaps just get used to not trying (I’m not suggesting barbed wire or anything that will harm them, but chicken wire is a good deterrent for dogs so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work on cats as well). 

    Then, too, if there is an ample play area for them with things to climb (in the middle of the yard where they can’t leap over the fence or onto the roof, of course) they may not want to go outside the perimeter.

    We had a baby gate up for years which kept the cat in, mainly because she didn’t want anything to do with the dogs.  When George became ill and she was no longer threatened by his enthusiasm, she started wandering out.  I was standing in the kitchen one day and heard the ‘thunk’ that signaled the dog door had been used; seeing both dogs in front of me, of course there came Ziggy, sauntering up the steps just as pleased as can be and clearly well versed in the path.

    We’ve seen her rarely in the front yard.  She seems to want the quiet of the backyard, and our neighbor’s yard.  They moved out a year ago and it just sold, so I think she claimed it as her yard.  So we’ll see what happens when the new neighbors move in (and I really hope they haven’t any cats!).

    So, that’s a long way of saying that ultimately if you have to keep outside access for the dogs, I just don’t see any way to prevent the cats from using it if they want to.  I’m not familiar with the fencing you referenced, but I don’t see why you can’t equip the top of the fence with something that will get them to stop trying to get past it.  Might be your only option aside from just laying pads out for Eli and closing the door.

    Posted by Print  on  05/27  at  05:22 PM

  7. I guess I’ll just keep a close eye on the situation for now, as the door we have is “weighted”, although I don’t know if it’s heavy enough to stop the cats.  I think it would depend on how determined they are.  I do appreciate all the suggestions, and if just adding another weight to the door flap will fix the problem, then that sounds like a winner.

    While discussing this today, Flippy and I decided that we’d like to remove our sliding glass door completely, and just replace it with a nice, single door to the backyard.  The other half of the sliding door opening could then be filled in as a normal wall, and we could have the doggie door inserted directly into the wall.  Right now we have one of those dog door panels which sits in the sliding door track.  If the dog door was installed right in the wall, however, it would have enough depth for us to have double flaps, and I think that would really be helpful in keeping out dust and dirt while keeping cats in.

    Our sliding door right now just seems like a huge waste of space.  It lets a lot of heat in, and there’s only a small opening we can use because of the doggie door panel.  A single door plus a doggie door in the wall would actually give us a lot more freedom of movement.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  05/27  at  11:47 PM

  8. Here’s an expensive option that may or may not work depending on your yard.  Would it be possible to build a fully-enclosed area outside the dogdoor area?  It would be large enough to allow the dogs to reach a potty spot, but with chickenwire (or something more attractive) on all the sides *and* on the top to contain the cats.  You would have to let the dogs into the rest of the yard when appropriate, but the cats could have their outside access and Eli her potty spot.

    Posted by kabbage  on  05/28  at  10:19 AM

  9. Shirly Chong a well known clicker trainer has touted on many a list over the years that cats will not cross orange oil.  She puts it on the top of her fences to keep cats out of her yard and away from her dogs.  If you try it, let me know if it works.
    Nancy

    Posted by nancy  on  05/28  at  05:22 PM

  10. Maybe we can try a little moat of orange oil around the bottom of the stairs.  It would smell good probably, at the very least.

    Posted by Flippy  on  05/28  at  11:23 PM

  11. Yep, I’m definitely willing to give orange oil a try—why not?  At the very least, our cats will have silky smooth paws if they decide to flagrantly ignore it and walk through it.  I’ll certainly post about whether it works or not once we’ve had time to test it.

    Kabbage, I mulled over some sort of containment spot outside, but our yard isn’t really designed properly for that.  It’s entirely surrounded by block wall, so I’d probably be further ahead to just install the cat fence on the wall and leave the dogs their freedom.  I’ve seen some really nice cat containment systems in magazines, though—I think the cats would love to be outside in one of them.

    My dream is to have enough money to add on an upstairs balcony, which can then be totally enclosed on the top and sides with mesh or wire.  I’d then put in a cat door to let the cats come and go onto the balcony as they pleased.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  05/28  at  11:46 PM

  12. When we lived in a third floor apartment with a lovely balcony (and the neighbors who shared our balcony were wonderful people who also had cats), we left the sliding door open when the weather was good and let them go back and forth as they wished. Our neighbor’s cats used our litterboxes and food, and ours did the same in their apartment. We only had one accident, when the neighbors left the door open slightly after an ice storm, and one of their cats misjudged a run while be chased by her twin (littermates, about 4 months old). Neko fell.

    She apparently managed to run around the building and up the front steps, because she was waiting at the door as soon as someone opened it. I took her to the emergency vet (having been awoken and being the only sober person living in either apartment). She split her palate and that *hurt* but she was otherwise fine. The neighbors got better at shutting the door in bad weather.

    Lining the slats with wire fencing is good, assuming they won’t get stuck in it.

    Posted by georg  on  05/29  at  12:54 PM

  13. I wonder if there’s a baby gate with vertical slats (so the kittens can’t climb it), with the slats close enough together that they can’t squeeze through, that you could put at the top of the stairs. Something to consider also is that they’ll get bigger, so may not be able to slide through the slats in a few more months, even if they could now…though that wouldn’t help at the moment. Good luck finding something!

    Posted by Helena  on  05/30  at  08:10 AM

  14. Helena, the kittens are so large now that they’re able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!  Pretty much nothing keeps them contained except a closed door, and I’m sure they’ll be turning door knobs any day now :)  Everyone had a bit of a scare today though as one of the kittens got a bit frightened of the German shepherd and tried to run away from her, and it had a domino-like effect where kittens and cats were tumbling and scrambling everywhere in an effort to get back upstairs.  All were surprisingly uninterested in going downstairs this evening, ahem.  I doubt this sudden desire to stay upstairs will last very long, but it was a nice break.

    I think a cat fence around the top of our block wall is going to be in our future, although I just did a rough estimate in my head and I think I’m going to need about 350 feet of fencing.  Still, if I got that done, I’d feel a lot more secure about cats wandering through the house.

    First, orange oil though.  I need to order some.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  05/31  at  01:00 AM
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