Cats and furniture aren’t always a match made in Heaven. Your cat, which provides you years of companionship and love, also has a thing about using upholstery to sharpen its claws and even stretch out its back muscles.
In the past, the solution was to declaw the animal. But that’s needlessly cruel to a member of your family and can lead to long-term health impacts. A better way is to train your pet to leave your furniture alone.
One option is cat scratch tape. It’s affordable and easy to use, but does it work, and is it worth it? We took a look at the issue and put together this article full of insights on the topic. We hope you find it valuable.
In This Article We'll Discuss
Does cat scratch tape work?
Cat scratch tape can be a highly effective tool in training your cats to use something other than your furniture to sharpen their claws on. You need to know how to use it effectively and you need to get a good brand for it to work, however.
In general, cats hate stepping on things that feel sticky. Cat scratch tape uses that to repel cats away from your furniture. It’s a double-sided tape that adheres to furniture with one side and offers a tacky surface that cats hate on the other.
If you get a high-quality tape and adhere it to your furniture the right way, you’ll create a band around your furniture that cats won’t want to touch. After a while, they’ll just naturally learn to avoid your furniture.
One piece of advice to successfully using cat scratch tape is to keep your home pretty clean. The double-sided adhesive might keep cats away from your furniture, but it will also attract dust, pet hair, and dust mites like the devil.
What is anti-scratch tape for cats?
Anti-scratch tape is a double-sided adhesive used to keep cats from using your furniture as a scratching post. Cats hate anything that feels sticky, so when you have this tape on your furniture, it trains them to go elsewhere.
When shopping for anti-scratch tape for your furniture, make sure you get the right size with the right strength of adhesive.
Different kinds of tape differ in terms of strength of adhesive, size, and shape. Left on for too long, and you can risk damaging your furniture. Get tape that is too small for your cat and it won’t work. You also don’t want to get a tape that will hurt your pet.
How do you remove cat scratch tape?
Removing cat scratch tape from furniture isn’t usually a complicated thing. It’s designed to go down easy and come up easy. It usually comes up without effort from most fabric upholstery.
But because it is an adhesive, it does have an inherent risk that it will either come up incompletely or might even leave a mark from where it pulls away finish from the wood. The risk is higher if your tape is on for a long time and is in high heat and humidity.
A great first step is to try to scrape it up gently with a razor blade.
If the tape has been on wood for a very long time, you can try to pretreat it with WD-40. While that is commonly mistaken for a lubricant, in reality, it helps loosen up stuck metal bits and can help clean away adhesive, too.
Spray the tape and allow it to sit for 15 minutes. Then use your razor scraper to very gently lift it away. It should come away easily.
There might be additional adhesive residue on the wood, however. You’ll want to carefully, patiently spray it additional times with WD-40 and use your razor until there’s just a little bit of adhesive left. This, you can wipe up with a cloth and warm water.
Does tape keep cats off furniture?
Cats are very sensitive to touch sensations and don’t like things that feel sticky. Double-sided scratch tape works well to keep cats off furniture.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need to tape up your entire piece of furniture with sticky, double-sided tape for it to work. Stick to the base and corners where cats tend to like to scratch.
Most cat scratch tapes also have some shininess to them that makes cats curious about them. So, they investigate, touch, and discover that they hate it.
Is cat scratch tape worth it?
The question of whether something is worth it is never just about dollars and cents. It’s whether an outcome you’ve achieved is worth the investment of time and money. In the case of cat scratch tape, it usually is.
One significant reason is, used appropriately, it can help train your cats to scratch something else, hopefully, a scratching post you provide for them. That helps spare your furniture and reduces frustrations you have with the furriest members of your family.
You can get this for what is a pretty minimal expense in money. Most rolls of cat scratch tape go for less than $20. That doesn’t include time spent putting it on or removing it, but those are pretty quick tasks.
Conclusion
Your pets are an important part of your family, and you want to give them a home that is friendly and safe. But you also can’t let them destroy furniture, because that usually serves a specific function.
One way to discourage your cats from clawing up your furniture is to use double-sided cat scratch tape. Cats touch the stickier side and decide they want no further part of it. After a while, they just start to avoid that furniture and hopefully go after scratching posts.
We hope this article helps you create bliss in your home by keeping pets and furniture safe from one another. If you liked it, we’d love to hear about it in a comment. Or you can share this article on your social media networks. You never know who else might need some free advice.