Cats are tricky creatures. They know to stay off the furniture or the kitchen counter while you’re home, but they often go where they want when you aren’t home. I heard a good way to train cats is to discretely squirt them with a water gun when they do something bad, so they’ll learn to associate the kitchen counter with getting wet and will stay off it even when you aren’t home. The Innotek SSSCAT Cat Training Tool uses a similar approach without having to spray water all over your house. It’s basically a battery-operated motion-sensor and trigger that sits on top of a can of HFC134a gas. Put the can on the surface you want the cat to stay off, and the Innotek will sound an alarm and spray the harmless gas every time the cat jumps up there. Refill cans are available, but at least one of the reviewers on Amazon said the alarm alone was enough to scare the cat away after a while. It seems the MSRP is about $65, but Amazon has it for $29.03.
Innotek SSSCAT Cat Training Aid
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HFC134a is the same type of gas used in air duster cans. Even though it’s considered “harmless”, constant spraying in the cat’s face will cause the cat to inhale that gas which isn’t so safe in high concentration. HFC134a (Tetrafluoroethane) is not pure compressed oxygen and when inhaled in great amounts will cause asphyxiation because of the lack of oxygen. And never put it upside down unless you want to freeze your cat every time it passes through that area.
The trick is not to worry about cats on the counter or the furniture. They are cats…and will go on them if they want regardless of any training attempts.
If you think you have trained to stay off, then have fun with the illusion 🙂
I bought one of these systems and I am afraid that while it is a great idea, the implementation was very poor.
First, the sensor was very poorly tuned: we had the system in a far corner of a room, near a house plant, but it would go off every time someone entered the room (over ten feet away). We experimented with various positions and there was nothing that would both trigger when our cat went to climb the plant, but not trigger when someone came into the living room, or, indeed, walked anywhere in the general area of the plant, even many feet away.
But the deal breaker was that the pressure diminished over time, probably the result of a poor seal. After a few hours (regardless of whether any sprays had been triggered), there would be no pressure output at all–I’m guessing a slow leak.
As for tetrafluoroethane, I’m pretty sure the cat is not going to inhale a lot of it, so I wasn’t too worried (I’m pretty paranoid about our cats’ health in general, but it’s not like they’re huffing the can–it is quite a brief burst, and they do run away right away when the thing goes off).