If your cats are like our young ones, they love to scramble up the holiday tree. While it can be cute, it can also be dangerous. If you’re looking for ways to keep your cat from climbing the Christmas tree, this blog is for you!
We’ve unfortunately heard the horror stories about cats being electrocuted or hanged by the Christmas lights in the tree. I realize that this may be a stretch – in our 20+ years as cat moms, we’ve never experienced anything close to that – but it still scares the beejesus out of us! We always like to err on the side of caution when it comes to our kitties, so when our kittens started climbing the tree this year I freaked out.
And what do I do when I freak out? I research and try everything within reason to resolve the issue.
On a side note, we probably didn’t pick the best year to purchase a new 12ft Christmas tree – our “kittens” are 1 1/2 yrs old now… which is the purrfect climbing age – but an unbeatable Black Friday special got the best of us. What can you do?
Anyway, I was desperate to find a way to keep Friday and Zorro out of our new tree for their own safety – and I found a few solutions!
How To Keep Your Cat From Climbing The Christmas Tree
1. Okay so the first thing I tried ended up being a bit more effort than I’d like, but it worked. I read online that you can put orange peels in and around the Christmas tree and cats will not climb it because they don’t like the smell. This tactic helped… until the peels dried out. If you’re someone who likes to peel oranges on a regular basis, this could be a great solution for you.
2. After cleaning up what looked like a potpourri explosion of orange peels – and pulling Zorro down from the top of the tree once again – I read about aluminum foil. Apparently the sound and feel of aluminum foil is very unpleasant to many cats – so they won’t climb the tree if you put this in the tree. Guess what? This worked wonders – especially while we were at an out-of-town for the SnowCats convention. However – it’s no way to decorate a Christmas tree. It looks awful – and we’re pretty sure our neighbors now think we have the tin foil hats to match out tree. BUT – a temp fix while we were worried and out of town? We’d do it again in a minute!
3. When we came home from our trip it was time to decorate the tree. Aluminum foil has never been part of my Christmas decor so we purchased some organic orange extract online and rubbed down the middle of the tree. So far so good! No climbing, no tragedies and they only like to bat the ornaments – which are all unbreakable (no Swarovski crystals on this tree!) – so it’s fine with us!
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