Beat it

(Michael Jackson, 1982)



Our main achievement since buying the house has been to clear the garden of the impenetrable jungle.

It turns out, what we’ve done is create a mega communal litter tray for all the neighbourhood cats. Because, it seems, there is nothing a cat likes better that someone else’s freshly cleared earth to turd in. Every time we go to the house, there is another little deposit in the garden, with the telltale scratchings of earth.

Enough is enough.

Ideally, we’d set up a sniper at the kitchen window to shoot water pistols charged with hot chilli water until they understand they are not welcome. (Nope, we are not cat lovers, apart from a couple of very special exceptions). Or we could bring in the heavies, and borrow one of our springer spaniel or greyhound friends to scare them off. No cat would last long against Moon’s legendary speed (you should see how fast he can snatch up a bacon buttie), or Percy’s dastardly dreadlocks and determined nose (at least for tennis balls).

However, as neither of those options is feasible, we turned to the internet for a solution. These seem to range from the lame (sprigs of citronella) to the inhumane (but we’d have problems burying the bodies). We went for a combination of natural deterrent and man-made cunning:

1. Lion poo. The idea being that cats establish their territory with smell. And one thing that will tell them this garden is already spoken for is the smell of a larger, scarier cat. (Who says cats are clever). Available from your local zoo or (preferable) as pellets soaked in essence of lion dung, then dried and sterilised, and sold as “Silent Roar”.

2. The “Defenders Mega Sonic Cat Repeller”, which “incorporates a sophisticated Passive Infra Red detection system, which constantly monitors a fan shaped area of a 98 degrees arc up to a distance of 12 metres. It detects animals moving into this area and triggers a burst of continuously variable ultrasound, which sweeps a frequency range of 18,000Hz, 24,000 Hz to repel them.”

We have today cleared the turds, hopefully for the last time, and laid down the traps.

Beat that pussycat.