Cat Behavior: Scratching Furniture

Video Transcript

"For all cats scratching is a normal behavior. They scratch for a number of reasons. One is to help to stretch themselves and increase their flexibility. A second reason is so they can actually clean their nails and sharpen their nails and get off any extra nail sheets that are there sort of like us getting a manicure so scratching is really important for the cat and it's something that they naturally want to do. You get in trouble with cats when they choose to scratch something that we value and don't want to be scratched. So there's two things that you can do. One is to provide scratching areas for the cat that they're going to like better than your furniture or our walls and I have a couple of examples here to show you. This is my cat scratching pad from home. You can see that it's well used. It's been scratched well and dug out and they love to rub and roll in it. It is just corrugated cardboard laid on end and some catnip is applied inside it to make it attractive to the cats. They love to scratch and roll on this and they like it in this condition. If I were to get a new one they probably would still scratch here. Another type of scratching surface that you can use is this sisal scratching surface. It's a rope and you can see how it is laid down in a linear fashion going this way so the cat can actually get its claws in and scratch down so that it can help to clean all the old nail material off its claws so both of these are good scratching methods and keep looking until you find something that your cat likes to scratch better than your furniture or your walls."