How To Make Your House Cat Friendly

Hi, my name's Karen. I'm one of the vets at cat's protection, the U.K.

's leading cat welfare charity and I'm going to talk to you today about some aspects of cat care. Hi, I'm going to talk to you today about how to make your house cat friendly. First of all, why would you want to make your house cat friendly? Well, this is because cats are quite highly evolved in some ways and they have quite specific needs.

Cats have, a domestic cat, has evolved from the African wildcat and this is a solitary animal that lives outdoors and eats in a certain way and has a lot of intrinsic habits, now domestic cats have carried on a lot of these traits as well. The idea of making your house cat friendly is trying to provide all of these needs in a way that's fun and engaging for your cat and sometimes it's not even the obvious things, but sometimes it can be really easy and fun. The kind of things that your cat needs are going to be similar to what the African wildcat needs.

The first thing to know about African wildcats compared to a domestic cat is actually they tend to like time alone. Most cats like to be solitary quite often and they don't always need friends. So, make sure that your cat's got places to go and hide where it can feel comfortable and secure.

Using igloos and covered things like this can be really useful. Even this upturned table of boxes can be of use as well. Make sure they've got somewhere to go that's up high.

A lot of cats like to get up high especially if they feel stressed, it can be a coping mechanism. So making sure there are windowsills, or sometimes high shelves, couple of wardrobes, places like that. Make sure they are cat safe so the cat can access them easily.

Cats in the wild eat around about eight to ten small meals per day. And it's a good idea with cats inside the house, especially if they're indoor cats, to try to mimic this behavior in the way that you feed them. If all they have is just a bowlful of food that can be quite boring to them.

So if, there are a few simple and easy ways you can do to increase their enjoyment of this. Food balls can be really useful. These you can just put dried food in.

They have little holes that as the cat rolls around, the food falls out and they can be a really good way of engaging your cat and causing it to have a bit more interest in what it's doing. It's a great way to exercise your cat as well as sometimes cut down on the calories this can be really useful for overweight cats. Some simpler and cheap ways of doing this as well is just hiding food around the house.

Especially if you're using dry food, you can hide food in small cardboard containers anything that's going to make the cat a little more engaged. With water for your cat, it's important that you separate the food and water bowls. A lot of people like to keep them together, the cats actually prefer to keep them apart, and this comes from their wild ancestors who would always try and keep their prey away from water sources so it doesn't get contaminated.

So it's a good idea to try putting your water bottle in a different location or even having multiple ones for your cat to choose from. Some cats are a bit picky about water. Some of them find that plastic water bottles can taint the water and make one out of a ceramic or a stainless steel bowl.

Some cats really like running water, again that goes back to their natural traits and they may like to drink out of a tap or sometimes, they can have little water fountains to drink from too. Cats have a need to scratch their claws for multiple reasons. They need to keep their claws healthy, but they also need to use the stink glands on their feet and they can use it to mark territory.

So, the scratching posts are really important, they need to have somewhere to scratch. It's a good idea to have one like this where they have multiple perches and where the lines run long between the border. Toileting is another really im