Grabbity and Sir Izacat Mewton came to live with us in August last year, at about 10 weeks old. They are siblings and incredibly affectionate. I don’t remember the last time I had two cats that were so keen on snuggling and sitting on my lap and being near me. Utterly adorable.
Whilst we have a fair amount of space here, Grabbity and Mewton are indoors cats. I asked my Dad to make us a cat wheel so that they can burn off a little energy – energy that they would otherwise burn off at 2am by jumping up and down on our heads. This is a prototype, made of steel, hardened woven kevlar and, yes, duct tape.
We picked up the wheel in November, unpacked it and pretty much left the kittens to just get used to it being around. They didn’t seem overly bothered by its presence, so we tried to introduce them to the idea of running on it using the age old tactic of bribery and corruption:
Our attempts met with a modicum of success: Grabbity in particular enjoys running on it, although sometimes she does so with just her front legs!
As with all prototypes, though, we found a few bugs so it’s currently undergoing some improvements. We are also planning a second prototype that will be larger, wider, have a solid see-through back and a larger bearing to prevent vertical play in the axel. Hopefully we should get that one done by spring. I shall, of course, report back on progress.
I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about the games that cats like to play, and she mentioned that her cat is showing signs of learning to play fetch. Fetch is a game that is primarily associated with dogs as it’s a game that they are taught in puppyhood. But a quick search on YouTube shows that there are a lot of cats out there who spontaneously learn to play fetch without any training at all.
I’ve never tried to teach a cat to fetch, but I’d imagine that a key part of it is to have a toy that is both light enough for the cat to carry, and is easy for them to pick up in their mouths. Something small and fluffy, like a soft ball or toy mouse would work, but some cats can manage something a little more unwieldy. Like a stick:
The trick would be persuading the cat to pick the ball up and bring it back. The initial chase is a core part of cat behaviour – they’ll chase pretty much anything that moves if they’re in the right mood. Because it is a part of their hunting skill set, which is essential to survival in the wild, it will take very little encouragement to get a cat to pursue a fast moving, small object. It’s functionally just like going after a mouse.
But what about fetching? I suspect that’s related to mothering behaviour: Queens with kittens will capture live prey and bring it back to the nest in order to teach the kittens how to kill prey. Kittens raised by incompetent mothers who don’t do this, or can’t do this because they don’t know how to catch prey themselves, will be unable to kill any prey they capture when they grow up. They may even be unable to hunt successfully.
I would be interested to know if the gender split in cats that play fetch, and whether their mothers were competent hunters. Are male cats or cats with incompetent mothers less likely to play fetch? My friend’s cat is a tom, so clearly male cats can play fetch. A quick search of Google throws up many anecdotes of toms acting in a fatherly way towards their kittens, so I wonder if this type of behaviour is fundamental to both queens and toms, but just expressed more frequently in queens.
So both behaviours – chasing and fetching – are natural to cats. The trick would be inspiring these behaviours and then reinforcing them, which is easily done with clicker training. Once the cat is trained to understand the click, and then trained to target, i.e. to touch a specific item such as the end of a wand, then one can train the cat to pay attention to the ball. The chase is easy and probably doesn’t need much reinforcing. I’d then start reinforcing any motion of the cat’s mouth towards the toy, then any picking up action, then any motion back towards me, and so on.
The clicker technique is demonstrated in this video:
From a house design perspective, it doesn’t take much to make a space suitable for playing fetch. So long as there is enough room for the cat to get some speed up and no awkward nooks and crannies that might make retrieval of the toy difficult, one should be ok. Oddly, though, I can’t help thinking that this might be a great argument for a corridor!
This house in Japan has to be one of the most impressive examples of designing for cats that I’ve ever seen. It includes almost all of the features I’ve been thinking about over the last year or so:
high walkways
cat stairs
hiding places
internal catflaps in the walls
large, secure outside pens
well positioned litter tray
cat tunnels
It’s no surprise that such a house would be built in Japan, as My Cat Goma says, falling birth rates means that pets are becoming more and more important to their owners. But, contrary to what some people seem to think, this isn’t indulgence. Cats that are kept indoors need more opportunities to exercise and play than outdoors cats, and if they don’t get them then they are prone to obesity and diabetes. Giving them high walkways and cat stairs is just encouraging natural behaviour, as is providing hidey-holes.
Overall, the interior design of this house is very modern, clean and sleek, and with all the windows and light it looks like it’d be lovely to live in. Human needs haven’t been compromised to satisfy the cats’ needs, but rather the two are satisfied together, sympathetically.
You can expect to see many of these features in my house design, when I get that far!
Whilst I am on blogging “sick leave”, I have invited anyone who fancies it to write a guest blog post. If you’re interested in contributing a self-build, green or cat-related post, please email me! Meantime, many thanks to Jonathan Hopkins for this contribution.
Cats and the web go hand in hand. Dogs don’t get that much of a look in really when it comes to the internet do they? Is this because geeks are more likely to have cats and have therefore helped inflate their online credentials? Or because cats just genuinely do a whole load more interesting stuff that makes it onto the web? Not sure, but I definitely fall into the ‘geeks with cats’ category and as such have invested a considerable amount of time in trying to geek out my cat. And, as the first of a what might turn into a few guest posts on Kits and Mortar, I’m going to look at cats and GPS.
One of the most worrying things as a cat owner is dealing with the fact that for a huge percentage of time you don’t actually know where your beloved pet is. You don’t know what they’re doing, who they’re hanging put with and exactly how far they are straying from home every day or night. Well right now, we’re right on the edge of being able to buy a commercial off-the-shelf product that will enable you to do all of this and more using GPS.
Gone are the days of having to buy something super expensive and rather intrusive looking from a website that looks, well, questionable. Pawtrack, so I was told after a few email exchanges, will be available later this month. It’s one of the first proper cat GPS tracking systems I found and have kept my eye on ever since.
There’s already plenty of GPS trackers available for dogs, (and even mobile phones) but when it comes to cats and GPS it all comes down to size. Dogs can lug around a bigger transmitter device attached to their colars, but cats need something a lot smaller. And that’s what’s held up products like the Pawtrack. And even now, looking at the picture of Freddie sporting his Pawtrack, it still looks pretty hefty for a nimble cat.
In the meantime while companies like Pawtrack (and others yet to come to market I imagine) have been developing commercial products, as you’d expect, tech savvy cat lovers have improvised, with some really impressive results. It all started with Mr Lee, whose owner built himself a GPS and camera device that fitted into a neat(ish) package that wing around his neck – giving his owner an amazing insight into what Mr Lee had been up to everyday – from hiding out with mates under cars to meeting blue snakes in the forest.
Fast forward a couple of years to now and the Mr Lee site has been developed a whole lot further – with DIY or ready-built kits available for purchase, but still very much in the ‘Make’ category of feline GPS. Still though, you can get one of the GPS modules in the UK (complete with PC software, no Mac – Boo!) for just £35. You can check out someone who’s done just that in the UK and shared the results. Quite impressive really for the cost, you just need to add a harness and hope your cat doesn’t just end up doing combat style crawling when wearing it.
My personal vision for the future of geeks with cats? A cat flap that enables entry based on RFID and alerts the owner via email/mobile/Twitter etc on entry/exit, complete with a photo of the cat going in or out and a time stamp. A super-small version of the Pawtrack GPS hardware keeps a live log of the cat’s position via GPS and this then hooks up to some sort of Nike + type community for cats which plots out all routes and stats online and via mobile apps. Oh and did I mention the fact that the cat flap automatically scans the cat for weight and other health statistics, which is then live-linked to the vet’s system and cat food manufacturers custom production file tailored to the cat ready for customised monthly food production and delivery?
It’s just a shame that cat+ is already registered and appears to be a type of accounting software rather than a next generation cat community.
– Jonathan Hopkins is a creative & digital consultant that blogs at middledigit.net about brands, technology, cats and other things he stumbles upon whilst perusing the interwebz.
I was browsing through the Way of Cats blog when I came across their review of Litter Robot II – an automated litter tray which self-cleans and provides always-fresh litter for the kitties. Clean litter is deeply important to most cats, and they’ll refuse to use a litter tray if it doesn’t come up to snuff.
Anyway, I did a bit of digging (no pun intended), and it seems that many automated litter trays require that you buy either special silica gel crystal littler, or litter that comes in a special cartridge that fits in the bottom of the unit, which seems expensive and wasteful to me. ScoopFree, for example, requires you to change a tray cartridge of crystal litter every 30 days (although users report that you have to change it more often, for some, every five days) and many reviewers on Amazon report that the tray begins to stink pretty quickly.
The Litter Maid is another rake-based system which, like the ScoopFree, drags a rake through the litter to gather the poo at one end of the tray and conceal it. Unlike the ScoopFree, the Litter Maid uses clumping litter, not crystals, but it does require a special ‘waste receptacle’ which you have to continue buying for the lifetime of the litter tray. According to reviews, the rake-based systems tend to have problems getting jammed, which doesn’t sound so great.
Then there’s the CatGenie, a litter tray that uses washable litter and which actually acts more like a toilet, with the solids being liquidised so that they can be flushed away into your mains waste outlet, and the liquids being rinsed out of the litter and, again, flushed away. The entire system is cleaned using a special ‘SaniSolution’, which, of course, you have to keep buying (it’s their version of the waste receptacle/tray cartridge, I guess).
Now whilst it sounds like a good idea, the reviews on Amazon tell a different story. The system can get clogged up with poo and hair which requires manual unclogging. (Mmm! Poo soup!) It can overflow – remember that you’re pumping water into this thing – and at least one review that I read was from someone who’d had her house seriously flooded. Others have actually had to get plumbers in to hook the thing up to the mains. (It’s well worth reading this review, if only for the laugh.)
So this brings me to the Litter Robot, which has an entirely different design. Rather than having a rake or a flushing mechanism, the Litter Robot is a globe that does a sort of rotating sifting thing… you know, this video explains it better than I can describe it:
The main problems, from the negative reviews on Amazon, seem to be either that the cat doesn’t want to use it, or that there are mechanical issues. There are also issues with big cats ‘overshooting’, and ending up standing with their back to the door and pooping on the step instead of in the litter. One the plus points, you don’t need special poo receptacles so you can use normal bin bags, and any decent clumping litter will do, so it’s cheaper to run.
But all of these automated solutions have problems, and none of them are cheap. but if the customer reviews are anything to go by, then the Litter Robot comes out ahead, with far fewer bad reviews than good. Indeed, if you count 5 and 4 star reviews as good, and 3, 2, and 1 star reviews as bad, it pans out like this:
Litter Robot – 85% good, 15% bad (196 reviews)
Scoop Free – 76% good, 24% bad (128 reviews)
Cat Genie – 68% good, 32% bad (309 reviews)
Litter Maid – 52% good, 48% bad (491 reviews)
Whilst it might seem like an extravagance to have an automated litter tray, for an indoor cat it could be really useful to ensure that they always have a clean place to go. And any reduction in contact between humans and cat faeces also reduces your chances of catching toxoplasmosis.
It’s going to be a while before Kev and I get to have cats, so by the time we are ready for our Litter Robot I hope many of the problems will have been ironed out.
One of the big problems with indoors cats is that they frequently prefer to be outdoors cats and keeping them in when they want to be out can be, well, a bit tricky. As anyone who has attempted to keep a cat in can attest, they are very good at slipping unnoticed between legs, jumping out through windows you didn’t think they could reach, or squeezing through gaps you could have sworn were too small.
When my parents got Castor and Pollux, they attempted to kitten-proof the garden so that they couldn’t roam. That worked well whilst they were little, but eventually they figured out how to get around the strategically positioned chicken wire. No matter how hard my dad tried to find and plug the holes, they would find a way through.
Cassie, in particular, has a love of roofs and will leap from roof to roof, all the way down the road.
All three cats, Cassie, Polly and Fflwff, also have a fascination bordering on the obsessive with the front door. Given the opportunity, they will make a run for it, hiding out under the car or disappearing off into next-door’s garden before you can blink. Indeed, I think they believe the front door to be the gateway to Shangri La, so keen are they to get through it.
If my parents had a porch, however, they could use it a bit like an airlock, closing the inner door before opening the outer. That would prevent the usual cat location and head count ritual prior to each leaving of the house, and would make accepting deliveries and guests a much simpler process.
(If my parents sound a bit obsessive themselves, I can forgive them. They’ve had so many cats die in car accidents they are very protective, although they are easing up a bit now that they’ve realised that not only do they live in a much safer neighbourhood now, but also that the kittens can out manoeuvre them nine times out of ten.)
If you’re really serious about keeping your cat inside, though, a utility or mud room can fulfil the same function for the back door, allowing you to ensure that kitty never gets anywhere near slipping past you. I like the idea of a mud room – a place to take off muddy shoes, hang up wet coats and dry umbrellas. Kev’s very keen on the outdoors, so one day, a mud room is going to be essential.
But what about windows and patio doors? In the US, they use screens to keep out flying insects, but they can also keep in recalcitrant moggies intent on experiencing the great outdoors. I’m not overly keen on the look of screens, however. They do rather ruin the view, so if we move over there I’ll have to find some recessed screens that I can hide away in the wall when they are not being used.
It may sound a bit over the top, but if we are going to be serious about having happy and healthy indoors cats, then we need to plan for these everyday realities. And it’s far easier to include a porch, mud room and screens in the original design than it is to add them later when you realise how useful they’d be.
The idea of designing for cats is to get inside the feline psyche and figure out what changes you can make to your house to keep kitty happy. Now, I’m not a professional cat psychologist, (although if you are, email me!), but I think most cat owners would agree that cats really like being up. Up trees, up on your shoulders, up on top of wardrobes, or up on shelves.
When I adopted brothers Dodger and Oliver as kittens last year, I researched climbing products and was appalled at the utter absence of design sensibility in an entire product category.
Even the DIY projects I came across were consistently awful. [...] These are a combination of 12 and 36 units [...] carpeted with Flor tiles using industrial glue. The smaller shelves needed stronger attachment hardware to handle the weight.
Well worth going over to check out the photos (they’re copyright so I shan’t reproduce them here). Maxwell glued floor tiles to his shelves for added grip, but I don’t now if that’s necessary so long as the shelves aren’t too slippery and your cat has a relatively easy way route upwards.
Another favourite resting place for cats is somewhere warm and cosy – like the top of a monitor:
I have tried those radiator hammocks – metal frames that hook over a radiator and sport a furry cover for your cat to snuggle in – but I’ve never had any luck with them. My cats just haven’t shown any interest in them, maybe because they’re not very stable and so make them feel insecure. A well constructed monitor shelf, on the other hand, is stable, warm, and near kitty’s human.
Unfortunately, flat screen monitors rather rule out monitor shelves for the modern geek moggy, so I guess my futurecats will have to have theirs nailed to the wall instead.
One of the hardest things to do for an indoors cat is provide them with enough exercise to keep them fit and healthy. Cats that don’t move about enough are prone to putting on weight and risk getting diabetes – all of which makes for both sad kittie and sad owners.
Indeed, I saw this problem with my own cat, Fflwff, when she went to live with my parents down in Dorset. Introducing an adult cat into a household of three other adult cats (all female) is pretty tricky, and Fflwff spent about three months living on top of the wardrobe. She slept up there, ate up there, and only came down in the middle of the night to use the litter tray.
Fflwff’s a big cat, easily twice the size of some of the other cats we’ve had, and as such it’s important that her weight is kept in check. Unfortunately, even after my parents other cats died – thus giving her full ownership of the house – she did put on some pounds, getting up to 8.6kg (19lbs) at her podgiest. The vet recommended we get at least a kilogram off her, but that’s not easy for a cat that likes to sit about and sleep a lot!
The cure for Fflwff turned out to be the acquisition of two feisty kittens who now chase her round the house and steal her food, but that’s not an option for everyone. Providing you’ve got the room, though, a cat wheel can be a really good way to get your moggies moving.
The videos on YouTube of cats running on cat wheels seem mainly to be of Bengals, but don’t let that put you off – the idea is sound for any breed of cat or colour of moggie.
You can buy cat wheels from companies such as The Cat Wheel Company or PetZones, although they’re far from cheap. Given the concept of a wheel isn’t hard to grasp, it might be cheaper to find a local craftsman to make one for you. So long as the wheel is well supported and not too heavy, it should be pretty easy to make.
What may not be so easy is getting your cat to use it! The Cat Wheel Company has a few suggestions on training:
The main thing, I suspect, is to use positive re-inforcement. Use a toy initially to get them to understand that when they run the wheel moves, give food rewards every time they run to start with, then once the behaviour is established give random rewards to maintain it. A lot of cats seem to really love running on their wheels, so depending on the attitude of yours, it may not be that hard to get them to exercise.
It may seem strange to see a cat running on a wheel, but they clearly enjoy it and I’m definitely going to think about where I could put a cat wheel in when I come to designing my house. After all, well-exercised cats are not just healthier, they’re also less likely to exhibit bad behaviour, such as scratching or shredding, as a result of boredom.
Besides that, cat + wheel = hours of entertainment, so its a win-win situation for both hoomans and kittehs!
I’ve been telling a lot of people about this blog lately, and explaining the two main threads – green development and cat-friendly design. The concept of an ecohouse is very well understood, but I’ve been seeing a lot of blank faces when I talk about designing for cats.
We don’t generally think about the environment that we provide to our cats – we just assume that they’ll be happy in our houses as they are. Cats are pretty flexible creatures and they’ll make the best of where they find themselves, but in the UK we generally let our cats outside, where they get the majority of their exercise and stimulation.
But what if you couldn’t let your cat out? What if there were some serious threats to her safety that made it unwise to let her wander? Kevin’s brother lives near Dallas, TX, and has lost a number of cats that he suspects have been taken by coyotes. Even in the UK, there can be danger. When I was a kid living in Dorset, we lost cats to speeding drivers hurtling down a nearby road. Maybe, sometimes, it’s best to keep kitty in?
If that’s the case, if your cat isn’t allowed out, how do you ensure that she gets enough exercise? Enough stimulation? It’s good, of course, to have more than one cat so that they can socialise and play with each other. My cat, Fflwff, who lives permanently with my parents now, has benefited immensely from having two kittens to chase her round and steal her food: she was getting overweight and doing very little except sleeping, but now she’s regained a spring in her step and has lost several pounds.
But having multiple cats isn’t the whole answer. They also need a stimulating environment that caters to their needs. There’s inspiration out there already, and I’ll be looking at all the cat design I can find, but I’ll also be trying to understand what makes cats tick, and how I can best provide for their natural behaviours.
Follow Suw & Kevin Charman-Anderson as they learn about building an eco- and cat-friendly house. They have no land, and no budget, just a healthy obsession with building their own home.
If you want to send us an idea or link, you can find us on Twitter (just @kitsandmortar us).
