WAY OT: Cat Training

 

I have a second-floor apartment with a balcony about 10 feet off the ground.
It is a pain to let my cats in and out.  Also, they always want to hang out
in the hallway, which can annoy other residents.  So even if I escort them
outside, someone lets them in and they loiter in the hallway.  The hallway
presumably has more excitement than my apartment.

Anyway, I was thinking about whether there would be a way to get them
directly from the balcony to the ground and back again without leaving my
apartment.  Two ideas came to mind.

The first idea was to use a bucket and a rope.  I think the "down" trip
would be easy, but I think convincing them to get in the bucket and then
letting me hoist them back up would be harder to train.  Still, I think it
is doable.

The second idea was to just suspend something from my balcony that they
could climb in both directions.  I would only leave this out at night.  A
wide strip of carpet with a weight at the end seems like the obvious choice,
but maybe there is something more climbable.  Whatever it is should be easy
to stow (i.e. a telephone pole is out of the question).

Any other ideas?

Thanks, Datesfat

 

wrote:


My cats love to jump into cardboard boxes and sniff around. Maybe you
could
find a cardboard box that fits into a plastic milk crate (for
strength) and attach
a nylon rope to the corners so it doesn't tilt during lifting and
lowering?

Cat claws are unidirectional, they work during climbing UP, but a cat
is scared of climbing DOWN, so she will jump down four or five feet at
most.

If you could arrange about three platforms that they could jump down
onto, they might learn to climb back up a pole of some sort. They will
claw at a loose strip of carpet, but they won't climb it if it swings
freely.

 


That depends on the cat and the surface.

Some cats develop a technique for climbing down; but as you'd guess it isn't
very graceful and not nearly as fast as going up.

The cat (as you know) has to be oriented facing upwards and has to go
backwards down.  Some cats are better at it than others.

But even then I've noticed that cats coming down tend to try hard to avoid
it.  If it is 20 feet down from a tree, they will generally move as much as
possible by jumping down a few feet at a time.  So if there is a branch two
feet over and three feet down, they would rather go to that as an
intermediate step than go "down" the branch they are on.

I would be very curious how absolute height affects the decision.  If a cat
is 20 feet up it might be willing to jump from point to point to make its
way down; knowing that even if it makes a mistake a 20-foot drop will just
sting a bit.  I wonder if it would make the same decisions 150 feet up.  I
suspect not.

But then again you do have cats falling from high-rise apartment buildings
occasionally.  If they had that much common sense that wouldn't be
happening.

Datesfat

 


http://potatocannon.nodice.org/

Add a little propane.

 



Put a harness on the cat with an 11+ foot long leash. Lower him down, then
raise him back up later. 8^)