Neighborhood cats shit right in the middle of my lawn. It stinks and the robot lawn mover makes it even worse.
I do NOT like cats, and this is not helping.
What works to keep them from shitting on my lawn?
The votes have spoken. Some people are cat lovers; thanks for the great advice from the rest of you! I will not go out of my way to accommodate other people’s pets that aren’t welcome on my property. My first weapon of choice will be chili because it’s simple and cheap. Other ideas have been noted.
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You can have a dog, but then you’ll have a problem with dog shit
Go with it, not against it. Make a small sandbox. Cat would favour that as a toilet over anything else.
Go with what…continuing to allow people to have strays? No thanks… relocate the cat or give it to the SPCA to be sold to someone who ACTUALLY cares about the animals wellbeing.
Don’t cater to neglectful owners by providing places for them to shit in the wild. Disgusting
Ignoring strays, you do realise there is no practical way for a cat owner to control where their cat takes a shit?
That is not negligence, it’s nature.You can’t tell a dog where to shit, the difference being you’ll pick it up where you can, and it probably can’t climb fences.
Yeah…keep it inside and give it a box of whatever to shit in. This also isn’t just about their shit but the utter disrespect for the animal to allow it to roam free, unsupervised and the disrespect to the other humans who are forced to live with the animal you chose to set free
There literally is. You can respect your neighbors by not letting your cat roam free, the same way I don’t let my dog roam free. I really do not understand why people have trouble with this very simple concept.
The cat is happy to go outside. It’s their natural behaviour. Doesn’t mean I approve but don’t spin this as being neglectful.
No shit. Dogs like going outside too, but it’s considered neglect if you aren’t in direct supervision.
It’s neglectful. You don’t know when it last ate, you don’t know what diseases it gets…it’s uncaring, and neglectful to the animal.
Throughout history, humanity has had to adapt to nature instead of trying to change it to suit humans in various ocasions. Where a cat takes a shit is one of those times lol. That said, cats are normally clean as fuck. My cats live free in the backyard and I have never seen or smell where they shit because they bury it very well and never in the middle of the yard. I don’t know how op is having problems with that, it is just weird.
Cats are domestic animals. We literally altered nature then flew them around the world. They are not native to NA. Keep your cats leashed or indoors and monitored when outside.
They aren’t domestic animals they’re tame animals, they still haven’t diverged from wildcats and there are a bunch of wildcat/house cat crossbreeds because of that.
Cats are semi-domestic at best.
motion activated sprinkler
predator pee scent in your lawn
hot pepper flakes around your lawn
put trap boxes out with bait inside, catch the cat
Especially the last point. Bring it to a shelter 2 counties over.
depending on your jurisdiction, but especially in rural and farm areas you may be permitted to cull feral animals on your property.
In ecologically sensitive areas, (basically Islands, the Americas, Australia) cats are a invasive species, and put local small animal species in extreme danger. There may be a government program to assist in your effort. i.e. Australia’s Cat Free Kangroo Island initiative https://conservationbytes.com/2021/05/20/killing-feral-cats-quickly-and-efficiently/
I want to cull even non-feral ones, like these…
In most places which have these laws, any cat which is allowed to roam free is considered feral unless it has a collar or something.
And I want to cull people like you. A shame we don’t always get what we want.
Cats should be kept indoors for a variety of reasons, including that they’re one of the largest threats to native species in the world and that they live longer indoors anyways due to the lack of picking up parasites and are at no risk of being preyed upon by larger predators. But to say you want to murder animals en masse just because they don’t understand property laws and do their business outside like… some sort of animal would is absurd, bordering on psychopathic. Might as well sit on your porch with a shotgun on your lap in case somebody’s dog decides to pee on your bushes.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Check your local laws regarding your ability to cull nuisance animals on your property. If these animals are being fed by your neighbors that may cause relationship drama that is worse then a cat shitting in your lawn.
When I lived in the country side, we never had feral cat problems, if your cat ran outside, it would disappear ( probably eaten by cayotes ) in a few days.
Fuck the downvotes, do this.
It’s pretty amazing to me how angry people get about dogs pooping in their yards and owners not picking it up when anyone with a cat who ever lets it out makes zero effort to keep that cat from pooping in other people’s yards and most people don’t seem to mind.
The older the cat, the less they bury their excrement. Sometimes it’s just enough to obscure it so you step in it. Sometimes it’s notburried at all. It’s so much more offensive to me than dog poop that I have to assume there’s some sort of genetic marker that some of you lack that makes me smell it as one of the most foul smells i’ve ever experienced. I’ve lived next to someone with 20 some cats and barely any yard and they made it completely impossible to enjoy my yard at all, and unlike dogs putting up a fence does nothing.
Plant non toxic cat repellant plants:
A motion activated or retomely deployable sprinkler system would work wonders. No need for drenching the critter, just interrupt or annoy the cat. After a few forced baths, the cat would associate shitting on your lawn with getting wet and just move to safer grounds.
Easy. Get rid of the lawn. Animals live outside. If it’s not this cat, it’ll be something else.
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I am not a lawyer but this sounds like terrible advice.
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I am not a proctologist, but this sounds like a shitty question.
I know that there are certain laws against booby trapping your property, for example. As I said, I don’t know the specifics but that’s what it made me think of.
I don’t think it counts as a booby trap. The intended mechanism is not burning the cat. The chillis will smell and the smell with keep the cat away.
It is not hidden with a trigger, or another thing to throw the chillis at the cat (or small children.) That would a booby trap.
I’m sure a lawn mower wouldn’t turn that into a war crime. I’m sure their neighbors would have no problem with this.
I do this all the time so unknown animals leave my garden alone. To me it smells great and the one time a neighbor asked I said it was roundup then said it was a joke and it’s actually tropicals fertilizer. Nobody has ever complained about spicy air.
Cats hate citrus peels and red pepper/chili powder or flakes. They will stay away.
Learn to love cats. Then they’ll leave you alone forever.
Accept that animals shit outside.
Cool, Imma just let a dog shit on your lawn and when you get annoyed you can just accept that dogs shit outside.
I’ve already accepted that animals shit outside. Why would it upset me?
Doubt it. You’d 100% be telling someone to clean up their dog shit.
Also, the shit is only a small aspect of the disrespect and neglect people push on their outdoor cats.
I cannot fathom the low intelligence required when it comes to people not understanding why you should have cats unmonitored, unleashed and roaming free.
Doubt it. You’d 100% be telling someone to clean up their dog shit.
I’m glad you and the fictional version of me you’ve constructed can carry on this conversation without my continued involvement.
Don’t need your involvement to know you’re full of shit and that if your lawn was covered in dogshit from your neighbours that you wouldn’t be pissed off.
I don’t care if an animal shits on my lawn. I’m not rolling round on it, and I’m not super precious about my bougie lawnmower like OP.
Are you incapable of imagining that there are people out there who aren’t joyless karens?
Tf are you talking about joyless…there is no joy in someone being careless with their ‘pet’ and neglecting them while letting them roam because look how cute fluffy is.
Oh the shock and horror, the animal that hasn’t been fully domesticated yet likes to be outside. Just because you let your cat go outside doesn’t mean you’re neglecting it.
There are 5 basic welfare needs: suitable environment, suitable diet, need to be housed with or without other animals (species specific), need to be protected from suffering/disease and the need to show natural behaviours. Sure most of them can be met indoors but you can’t provide a suitable environment or let them show natural behaviours unless you allow them to go outside when they need to or you live in a mansion that’s big enough for a cat to fill it’s territorial range.
Cool, so they are not domesticated so we should consider them pests and have the population culled because it’s an invasive species. Thanks
So all non domesticated animals are pests now? What about geese? Or deer? Are they all pests? They’re invasive species in certain countries too.
Bushmasters are good for this.
Get a dog.
Sorry buddy it’s their lawn now, smells like them.
Don’t like it? You gotta shit on your lawn to show them who it really belongs to
Shit on your own lawn to establish dominance.
@PlutoniumAcid a small pile of sand in a corner of yard would be preferred by most cats. other than that, as someone said above, “accept that animals shit outside.” besides, climate issues will soon make lawns go away anyway. 😢
All these psychopaths saying kill the cat or catch it and relocate it are fucking deranged. Talk to the owners if you know who it is… firstly, I’m sure they would at least be receptive to the problem and if they’re not then maybe look into legal outlets. If you’ve gone out of your way to post on lemmy you’re technically savvy enough to look up local laws. people have also posted actual remediation methods that aren’t terrible and could actually improve your lawn in some scenarios as well so maybe try those out if you’re into them.
I’m positive that no one wants to lose a pet in any capacity. Just some simple communication with the owners could solve this, and if not, there are other options.
Sorry you’re going through this though, shit sucks. Pun intended.
I can 100% guarantee you that the owners will just be extremely confused about the idea that people might not want other people’s “pets” in their yard. I can 100% guarantee you that the response will just be “well it’s a cat.”
And it means that if something ever happens to this small animal, OP will get blamed for it if he says anything to the neighbors.
100%?
Yeah, I’ve dealt with this situation before. People who let cats roam free like this seem to live in a world where there is precisely one socially acceptable exception to otherwise generally accepted neighborly decorum - cats. Suggesting that you don’t want their cat on your property makes you the asshole in their eyes, because they literally cannot comprehend any solution to the problem. Obviously the sky is blue, and cats are allowed to shit wherever they want. Thus spake the toxoplasmosis.
