Foiled Again

“It’s like having your fingernails ripped out down to the first knuckle!” They tell you, with straight faces and the kind of wide brown eyes cult leaders use to hypnotize their followers.  This is what the lady at the animal shelter told us when discussing whether or not we would declaw the kitten. 

“Their personalities often change because you’re taking away their only defense system.”  Cats have personalities?

“It’s illegal everywhere but the United States.”  Because we’re barbarians, was the unspoken post script.  I began to wonder if this woman ever toured a big city with a can of red paint, drowning animal-rights war criminals in it.

I signed the waiver that said no, I would not declaw the cat and yes, I swear.  Knowing that I’d never see their faces again, and realizing this was a reason to do whatever I wanted.
 
I brought the kitten home.  I had just gotten a new sofa for the living room.  A new fabric sofa that, apparently, was irresistible to those pins on the end of kittens paws that they tell you are claws. 

The terribly cute bundle of fuzzy fluff would fly across the hallway into the living room, leap onto the sofa with that picking sound, and plant herself on the window sill.  Once, a paper-shade lamp got in her way so she jumped on it – expecting her claws to be more reliable – and I heard a thunderous rip of the lamp shade from the other room.

But I cleared the less cute bundle of destructive fluff of the living room sofa addiction in a hurry.  Water Gun Intervention.

Next was the den sofa.  Little by little, the basket of kitten-ness left little thread pulls shaped like her pins all over the sofa.  I took a razor to it the weekend I was having houseguests, thinking she might see the prettied up sofa and decide that her dust-covered scratching post would make a better scratching post.

As my guests and I were sitting right there on the sofa, she arched her back in that yoga pose, Hone Claw, and went to work.  I chased her away with a water gun.

Then I pulled a trinket from the far reaches of my memory.  Cats don’t like the noise aluminum foil makes.   I’d read or heard this years ago, when a former cat urinated all over the carpet in an old apartment.  Would it apply to scratching?

While my guests were enjoying cheese and wine, I began wrapping parts of the sofa in foil.  Vertically around the arm, tucking each piece under the bottom.

“Are you trying to tune in Tokyo?” One guest asked.

“This is hilarious.  I should take a picture of this and send it to everyone you know.” Chided another.

The kitten avoided the foil.  I couldn’t believe it.  I sneered at my guests, reminding them that my ridiculous plan was working.  And right about then, the little shit found an exposed area of the sofa and we heard that rip, rip.

“See, you need to get that extra large foil and wrap the entire sofa in it.  Not only would it stop the cat, but you could turn the sofa into a radio.”

After they left, I lay the foil at the base of the couch, all the way around.  So the horrible creature couldn’t reach the sofa without walking on foil.

I couldn’t believe it.  The cat stayed away from the sofa, apparently afraid of the scary foil noise, and I didn’t need to worry about coming home to shreds of a sitting area.  My cute fluffy puff was back and significantly further away from being sold to a Chinese restaurant. 

Just yesterday, I found her playing with the foil and ripping it into little pieces before making her way to the base of the sofa. 

I might rip those claws out myself.