Clever tin foil hack helps keep cats away from Christmas trees

Yeah, this is a classic example and a useful one of how to use tin foil to deter the family cat without scaring him/her. You want some sort of control at Christmas and this provides it. Cats hate tin foil. I have seen is used successfully on kitchen counters. Cats immediately jump off when they land on foil. 

Clever tin foil hack helps keep cats away from Christmas trees. Screenshot.

The problem with tin foil on kitchen counters is (1) you can't use that part of the counter and (2) it's inhumane because it frightens cats.

But putting tin foil around a Christmas tree deters the cat in a friendly way. They hate the stuff but as you can see in the video they place one paw on I and back off.

This cat's response might not be entirely typical but I would expect it to be pretty commonplace. A cat might run onto it which may scare them. 

Reason why tin foil deters cats

Why is tin foil such a hostile product/object to the domestic cat? The answer is that it makes a strange crinkling noise when walked on. That is the source of its effectiveness.  All animals including the human-animal become agitated and anxious when they hear sounds of a certain high frequency and which are repeated. Alarms make these sounds to get our attention. It is a natural response. Tin foil makes this sort of sound when walked on or compressed by hand or fiddled with.

Also, I feel sure that their is a connection with the sound of snakes that rattle their tails. I believe the noise is similar to the sound by a range of species of snake which shake their tails as a warning to keep a distance, including: rat snakes, gopher snakes, corn snakes, kingsnakes, pit vipers, copperheads, cottonmouths, bushmasters, terciopelo snakes, and cantil snakes.

Snakes of the Viperidae family (vipers) rattle their tails and they are sympatric with the North African wildcat i.e. they live in the same area. My guess is that the domestic's inherited memory interprets the sound of tin foil as a viper. Far fetched? 

The video shows us the rattlesnake sound. This species of snake is not distributed in the same area as the wildcat but the video's purpose is to compare the sound with the sound of tin foil. The rattlesnake is a viper.

The domestic cat ancestor, the North African wildcat meets some of these snake species and will avoid them. I believe that the domestic cat has inherited this fear of tail rattling snakes and avoids the sound of rattling tin foil when walked or jumped on.

Most animals consider snakes dangerous. That's why cats hiss like snakes when defending themselves. And it is why they curl up to look like snakes when sleeping (for tabby cats only but all domestic cats were tabbies at one time).

Scared cat seeks comfort in close contact with human mother

Scared cat seeks solace in human companion. Screenshot.

The video shows a ginger tabby cat on a sofa, clearly very frightened about something. We don't know what it is. Her ears are back in a protective position. The sort of body language that you see before a cat is about to fight only the general bod language indicates that this cat feels oppressed and she/he is submissive. She wants to crawl away and hide somethere, anywhere and seeks reassurance and comfort on the shoulder of her human companion. 

Why was she filming it though? She is making a video selfie. She has the face of Mona Lisa.

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I can't get the video to work. I uploaded it to Google Blogger and at first it worked but now...nada. It might work again but in the meantime here is another video which I know will work at least for the time being. It is similar. A cat who needs the comfort that comes from human contact and reassurance:

It is a nice yet sad video. The person looks oddly serene as if it has happened before. The video comes from Reddit. Someone on that site suggested that it was fireworks. It could be but we have no idea. It is the sort of reaction that fireworks generate in many domestic cats as they are strange external sounds. They sound like something hostile is 'out there'. This readies the cat for a defensive fight hence the pinned back ears which protects them. The cat's facial expression is very noticeable. It is not often that you see a clear facial expression in a cat.

Don't ever yell at or in the vicinity of domestic cats!

Don't ever, ever yell at or near a domestic cat. Don't even yell in the same house which there is a domestic cat. Don't even think about yelling when you live with a domestic cat. You are liable to frighten your cat and your cat may well associate you with being a hostile creature and if this happens it will weaken the bond between cat and human. 

Don't yell at or near domestic cats. Please.

It is not clever to make a video of you yelling at your cat as this complete moron did. His video has received more than 8 million views because it's been on the Internet for about 8 million years. And the only people who want to see it are voyeurs who have a curiosity about how a domestic cat would react to being shouted at. You don't need to be curious because the answer is obvious. Domestic cats are frightened by yelling at them or in the same room as them.

They respond well to the exact opposite: soothing sounds, quietness, calm, confidence and reassurances (make a cat calmer with food). This is what domestic cats thrive on. It doesn't take much to upset them with noise. Remember they have far better hearing than we have in terms of high frequencies. And the hearing is more sensitive than ours. So if we shout we don't know how they hear that but it is probably a very loud sound. I watched the video on this page about 14 years ago to see if I could put it on my website and it shocked me then and it is still on the Internet which shocks me now. It should have been removed by YouTube 14 years ago. Why? Because it is animal abuse. And it is probably in violation of YouTube policy.

The bottom line is: never yell at or in the vicinity of domestic cats. If you do it a lot then you are the wrong person to live with a domestic cat. And if you shout at your partner either male or female because you're constantly rowing then that too, I think, would disqualify you from looking after a domestic cat because you have created a home which is to hostile and too upsetting for a cat companion. Here endeth the lecture.....

Is Scaring Cats with Cucumbers the Funniest Thing You'll See?

On one website it says that scaring cats with cucumbers is the funniest thing you'll see today. I don't think it's particularly funny. Why should it be funny to scare a cat? It might look amusing to a person but it is still scaring an animal and, personally, I do not see any pleasure in doing that and I certainly don't see it being funny.



It seems to me that people find the reactions of cats to certain stimuli as funny when the reaction is extreme and strange. But this is natural behaviour for a cat. If the cat is frightened of a cucumber which is placed behind him then there's a good reason for his reaction. Perhaps the cat believes that the object might be a predator of some sort or a danger to him. Cats are not familiar with the appearance of a cucumber. Why should they be? If the cat is uncertain about what the object is then he initially will be anxious and in some cases scared. However, not all cats react in this way. It is about individual cat behavior. We should not imply that all cats are scared of the same things.

I'm just making a point in this short note. Lets be more sensible and stop thinking that it is funny to scare a cat even if the cat's behaviour might look amusing to a human. If a human thinks it is funny to scare a cat then the human has a problem in my opinion. Unfortunately, many humans have this sort of problem. It is human behavior born out of a sense of superiority over animals. Humans are not superior to animals.