Cat Furniture

Cat Furniture

Animal lovers often want their pets to share the same facilities and advantages that they themselves enjoy. Cat owners are no exception to this. They love to have their cats with them all the time, in bed or on the couch, draped over their lap or legs perhaps. They like their cats to eat as well as they do, only the best would do for their beloved little four-legged friends. And they also want their cats to have furniture of their own, just like they themselves do.

Cat furniture is a specialized class of products that has an impressive range and variety. From the humble basket to the decorative scratch post, you can find a product to fit almost any type of need and any budget range.

Sleeping is one area of activity that cats seem to the greatest experts of! Most of the time that they remain within the house, they seem to spend their time lounging and dozing. It is not for nothing that the word 'nap' has come to be associated with cats! You can buy sleeping furniture for your cat, though there is no real guarantee that your pet tom or tabby will take to it. Cats are remarkably independent creatures, and they go where they want, and sleep where they please. Still, with a little effort you can possibly make them get to like what you offer.

Identify the places in your house, the nooks and crannies, the perches and hidden places where your pet habitually likes to sleep. Then place the sleeping furniture there or near those places, so that it comes to associate the furniture with sleep, and may take to it. Be sure to buy something that is firm yet soft. Cats do not feel comfortable with surfaces that have too much 'yield' to them. They feel secured only with furniture that do not move or bend precariously, but remain firm under their feet.

Also, be sure to buy something durable, because if they use it, they're going to scratch their claws against it. This is something that the cat habitually does, and the entire range of human furniture in your house suffers for it. Traditional wisdom has it that they do this in order to sharpen their claws. However, the scientific truth is that they just want to shed the outer, dead layers of their claws and reveal the shiny new set underneath.

One item of cat furniture that you can buy to address this problem is a scratching post for your cat. These can be placed in places which your cat likes to frequent, and where they like to scratch. A bigger, improved and more multi-purpose version of the scratching post is the cat tree, which is a complex affair comprising of perches, tubes, branches and other shapes that cats are fond of, arranged in a vertical structure.

If your cat takes to it, you'll see it spending a lot of time lounging on it or hanging from it or just draping itself around one of its branches. It will also scratch this piece of furniture a lot, so it's best to avoid cat trees that are covered in expensive carpeting. If you try to train it not to scratch the carpeted areas, it will become confused and may decide to abandon the tree. So just buy one that is covered with sisal instead.

When cats scratch furniture, they deposit their own peculiar scent on the surface, from a type of gland in their paws. In this way, they like to mark the objects of the house as belonging to them. So they may not immediately take to a scratching post or a cat tree when you bring it in from the pet store, brand new and without smell. It is often necessary to make it more attractive to the cat by imbuing the new piece of cat furniture with catnip in moderate quantities, or a spray that contains catnip essence. This goes for all other items of cat furniture, if you want to make them acceptable to your cat.

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