Trouble Tuesday
I am in BIG trouble. I chewed threw daddys Iphone headphones last night. He was so mad, I ran and hid. He took my feather toy and threw it away:( He said I broke something of his so I loose something too. He locked me out of the bedroom last night and I had to sleep on the couch :( Mommy is going to replace the headphones today. There was lots of yelling and i was scared. mommy wants to post something as well so I am gonna let her.
pixel
Pixel’s mom Karen here,
I need so advise/help. She is starting to play with wires. She is lucky it was a low voltage wire. We have alot of tech things and alot of current going threw things, We are worried she will electrocute herself. So any thoughts on what to do. She is not realy afraid of water. I am curious if there is a ” wire” you can buy that when chewed will shock her or give her a safe tingle. I mean to teach her not to do it. I am at a loss. Help. I do not want tp find a fried cat. And I can not unplug everything.
Karen
Oh Pixel, it wasn’t your fault. They shouldn’t have yelled at you or taken your toys away - you can’t understand that what you did was wrong.
Pixel’s mom, there is some bad-tasting stuff you can get to put on the wires, to discourage pets from chewing them. If you check your local pet supply store, you should be able to find stuff.
Could Pixel possibly be teething? Getting some chew toys, like the Chilly Kitty Chews from Pet Stages might also help. Good luck!
I totally agree with Dragonheart. Yelling and having your toys taken away is not the way to handle this situation. Poor Pixel, you must’ve been so scared and confused.
There is something called “Bitter Apple” that is a bad tasting spray (usually found by the dog stuff in the Pet Store) that should help. It tastes gross, but won’t hurt us, it just made me not want to chew cause the wires tasted so nasty.
Mommy also put cords (for expensive & uber dangerous stuff like the TV) inside cardboard tubes from paper towel rolls / wrapping paper until I learned not to do that. Teething toys can help too.
I think your daddy should apologize for throwing your toys away and not get a new I Phone until you get a new toy. See, sometimes chewing is a stress habit like a kid sucking a thumb.
Your daddy yelling at you like that could make it worse because you may chew when your upset / stressed and your daddy yelling makes you upset / stressed so you chew again. See what I mean? Your daddy needs to remember, you’re a kitten, not a human and you don’t understand punishment the same way.
These are the things that worked for us, maybe your VET could have other ideas.
oh Pixel, it wasn’t your fault that you didn’t know it was wrong - you is just a baby. it’s not fair that you gotted yelled at and your toy got thrown away. poor honey.
Pixel I did the same thing when I was a kitten - it lasted a few months - I chewed through LOTS of stuff, but never got buzzed. HOWEVER, mommy put al-u-mi-nim foil on all the cords and hot pepper sauce and I stopped chewing. hot pepper sauce is NASTY.
Sammy
Poor little Pixel! You didn’t know any better. I am sorry you got your toy thrown away. I hope you get TWO new ones to replace it.
I was never a chewer when I was a baby. But I was already 12 weeks old when I was adopted. When I did something dangerous, I got a little water squirted at me from a tiny squirt gun! That got my attention fast.
Poor Pixel, all the yelling and shutting you away on your own will teach you is to be frightened of more punishment and humans. It won’t teach you not to eat the wires. Ask your humans to go to an electrical supplies store and buy some flexible cable conduit, this can be used as a cover for any dangerous wires around the house. I don’t think it’s too expensive either
If you are teething (and even if you are not) you need plenty of toys you can play with and chew on safely. Really, the more toys the better, and the more playtime the better. Distraction play followed by rewards (treats) are a great way for showing a little kitten that good behaviour gets rewarded.
If your humans have a small water pistol, the trick to using it to deter a kitty from doing something they shouldn’t is for the human to be out of sight of the kitty when they need to use it. The humans mustn’t make any shouts or noises when they use it either, just hide, squirt and watch the kitty move from whatever it shouldn’t be doing.
Good luck little Pixel
(and humans)
Peach Man’s Mama here: First keep your wires as tidy and tied up as you can. Then, I suggest rubbing lemon rind on the wires to discourage Pixel from chewing. My friend’s cat–also named Pixel (not kidding!)–had this habit too. Hopefully, your Pixel is sensitive to citrus. Also try to scruff her and say no with a tap on the nose when you can catch her in the act. She’s still young and responsive to discipline like her mama would give her. If she’s also biting toes (which if she’s biting wires, she might be!), try yelping and helping her to learn what “too hard” is as her sibs would. I agree with Hendrix that yelling doesn’t help because by the time you get around to yelling, she’s already forgotten what she did to make you yell. Good luck!
I agree (well, my Momma agrees) with Dragonheart, Hendrix, and Sammy. You might be teething and I loved to chew cords when I was teething. I did get squirted with a squirt bottle, but Momma couldn’t watch me all the time, so used Bitter Apple on the cords at first. I was persistent, though, and kept chewing cords, so she bought habenero pepper sauce to put on the cords. It is nasty, nasty, nasty and I stopped chewing on cords. Momma thinks wrapping the cords in foil or paper towel rolls is a great idea, too. She wishes she would have known that 1-1/2 years ago.
The hard thing at our house is that our Daddy forgets and leaves his stuff laying around. We’re very curious and we do still like to chew on interesting stuff sometimes (like his iPod headphones). Daddy gets annoyed with us, but Momma reminds him that he needs to put his stuff where we can’t reach it. It doesn’t help to get yelled at (Daddy has yelled at us a couple of times, but Momma yelled right back at him). It just makes us more upset. Momma just reminds him of what the V-E-T told her at first - having a kitty is like having a perpetual two year old.
Mommas and Daddys just need to keep being firm and consistent and most importantly - very patient. We got lots of stuff to learn as kitties and we don’t know how to behave unless someone teaches us. Don’t get us wrong - we’re not perfect angels, but Momma and Daddy and us have all learned how to live pretty peacefully. And we’ve trained them pretty well to keep their valuable stuff out of our reach. They even installed baby locks on all the cabinets in the kitchen.
We send lots of hugs and purrs to all of you.
Love,
Tazo
Yep, they’re all good ideas. And if you’re worried about spraying the Bitter Apple or soaking wires with too much lemon juice, you can put some on a cloth or paper towel and use it to rub the stuff on. Yelling just doesn’t work well. Taps on the nose work really well with young cats, if you catch them in the act. And the nasty tasting stuff (citrus, bitter apple) work a ton better even if you’re not around to catch them in the act. Pixel will probably grow out of it, and get tired of chewing bad tasting things even faster than that. Chewy types of toys /treats are good things to give her an alternative to chew on too.
BUT… don’t get any kind of string toys, or string-looking toys, for Pixel, at least for now. They’re just confusing when you’re trying to teach her not to play with string. If she has toys with strings, put them away for now and get her things sans strings. It’s a HUGE help for kitties if you’re consistent, and trying to teach “this string type thing is ok but this one isn’t” is a bit much to expect her to get. Once she’s got the idea for a long while, then you can maybe try something that’s sort of string-like as a one-off toy, maybe a cat dancer, they are so springy they don’t LOOK like strings laying limp. Or just go with long floppy things (like that mitten thing for kittens that has huge long fingers and pompoms on the end) that gives her a “string” to stalk, but don’t look like a string at all. The key is not to give mixed messages that set her up to fail.
The throwing feather toys away doesn’t help any. But hey, it may make the dad feel a little better, so maybe it’s not totally useless. So try not to be too tough on the dad too. Better one trashed toy than a hurt kitty, eh? Some dads would have hurt the kitty, so he’s not a horrid monster, just maybe a little misguided and venting. And we’ve all got to live, us humans and cats, together, so tell Pixel not to be too sad about one toy gone away. There will be more toys.
Sanjee says she’ll send some cool not-string toys if it’ll make Pixel feel better!
*hugs*
MomRobyn
We agree with all of the above. I (Samantha)use to chew shoe strings. Dad was none to happy either, so he just put his shoes where I couldn’t reach them. They learn fast our Mom’s and Dads. They sprayed Tigger with the water, but he just went away cleaned himself and came right back. Your just young and you’ll grow out of it eventually.
Believe it or not, I was quite a terror when I was a baby. (The crowd shouts, “No way!”) *Everything was my toy, and I teethed for a Very Long Time!
So my beans (especially Mom) tried to keep everything behind a closed door that she thought was dangerous, and she did sometimes unplug things. At that time the beans had been playing around creating collages, and they just had to give up on that until I was grown up. Um. :::whispers::: I do still sometimes get into stuff. But not like I did then.
Bitter Apple Spray works really well. Also, you may want to explain the stress thing to “dad” as we get stressed when our dad yells too and then we do bad stuff. He’s learned not to yell at us, he yells at mom about the stuff we do but not “at” us. If he catches us doing something wrong now he claps his hands really loud or makes a hissing noise but he doesn’t yell like we are little beans and akshooally unnerstand (or care) what he’s yelling about. Throwing away a child’s toy may work (we doubt it) but the cat won’t care and will forget that the toy even existed.
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