Meet Penny Danger, a sweet ragamuffin of a kitten who found herself in my basement with her four siblings, and now has her own room inside our house as the newest member of our family. She still loves tiny shoe boxes though.
I never thought I would ever have a cat, but Ryan loves cats, and I love Ryan, and he has let me have three dogs - so we are going to keep the kitten. Any advice about kitten-raising would be deeply appreciated - toys, treats, how to discourage her from scratching my newly reupholstered chairs...
Ann, she is SO cute and has gotten big SO fast! Welcome to cat ownership. They are little loves. Enjoy her, and be sure to find a way to free feed where Oliver can't get to her food. :-)
ReplyDeleteAw, those eyes! And the parenthetical marks above them! Who could resist? I have three cats--it's tough to train them to not scratch as it's an impulse they can't really deny themselves. My advice is to train her to scratch something OTHER than your chairs (though if she likes your chairs, sadly, they are simply in for it). Get or make a scratching post with carpet remnants or something similar in texture to your chair fabric. It's all about the texture, so try to replicate it. Cats also quite enjoy scratching bare wood and cardboard, so see if you can lure her away from your chairs with those (try building a scratching post with plain old 2x4s, and cut up some of those moving boxes into smaller uniform pieces and glue them together with their corrugated centres facing out (that's the part they like to scratch) and affix it to something. You can buy something similar at Petsmart, but why spend the money when you can make it?). Alternately, spray her with water each time she goes near the chairs... Hope one of these things works.
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