Catify to Satisfy – Simple Cat Friendly DIY Projects

Catify to Satisfy: Simple Solutions for Creating a Cat Friendly Home is the sequel to the New York Times Best Seller Catification. Written by Jackson Galaxy who is the star of Animal Planet’s My Cat from Hell and Kate Benjamin, a cat design expert, it proposes simple DIY solutions for everyday cat issues.

The authors of Catify to Satisfy aim to make you look at your home in a different way. By focusing on cat behaviour and psychology they help you see your house through cat’s eyes. After all when you move into a home you look at it through your eyes only. Your pet cat then needs to change its’ behavior to fit in with your home design.

This can result in an unhappy or stressed cat. Cats after all can be both predator and prey. So they often require safe areas where they are secure but gives them vantage points. Also cats often have to exist in multi cat households.

Insecure and unhappy cats can lead to a number of issues such as litter box problems. Or being unable to get on with other cats in the home.

This is where this book comes in. The authors themselves have been involved in solving feline problems or helping with feline design. They have extended this knowledge to help you catify your home making it suitable not just for humans but also for cats.

Catifying Your Home

The book starts with the first basic step – making a safe and secure base camp for your cats. It talks about how to choose the best space where a cat can feel secure but still be accessible. After all this base camp is where your cat will learn to feel confident and not hide. This is due to territory being very important to a cat’s psyche.

This base camp will not have any hiding spaces, such as under beds or other furniture. Hiding spaces teaches your cat to hide and be timid and not be accessible. Therefore, the book shows how to remove hiding spaces and instead create cocoons. Cocoons are partly enclosed areas where the cat feels safe and cosy but they are not hidden or out of the way and are accessible by yourself.

There are other steps to catifying your home and having a confident cat:

Scratching behavior

How to redirect scratching behavior onto objects that both yourself and your cat will feel comfortable about. Therefore if your cat scratches a particular piece of furniture then look at what material the furniture is made from and whether it is vertical or horizontal.

Though we often use upright sisal covered scratching posts some cats might prefer wood or a reclining horizontal scratching area. By watching where your cat prefers to scratch and the material they choose means that you can then set up a cat scratching area which will appeal to them and keep them away from your furniture.

Litter Box behavior

This section covers how to make your litter boxes more comfortable for your cats whilst also hiding them away from humans. The main focus is on the comfort of the cat but there are some interesting creative hacks to hide litter boxes from sight. Not all these tips might work for your household though.

Jackson Galaxy does not like automatic cleaning litter boxes but in my household not having an automatic litter box does not work. I do not have the space for multiple litter boxes and Dyson (my cat) does not like a litter box that has been used. Therefore if I am out for the day I need to know that my litter box has cleaned itself so that she can reuse it which is why I use a Litter Robot.

Cat SuperHighways

The fourth step is on cat super highways which are the physical paths that your cat will use to navigate your house. These can be both horizontal and vertical ways of traversing through rooms and if you have a multi cat household then thinking about how a cat navigates can cut down incidences of stress.

In my case my cat goes from the floor to the computer chair, computer desk, cat tree ledge and then top cat basket in the cat tree. Now if another cat is on the computer desk this then cuts off this escape route. Therefore if I now place a lower shelf or box next to the cat tree this gives my cat another method to come down from the top cat basket without coming into conflict with another cat.

The book does show examples of this. Including some very amazing cat highways that some people have built through their homes.

Conclusion

This book is full of different design hacks that people have come up with to help catify their homes. From simple tricks, such as placing a yoga mat on top of a cabinet to make a kitty lounging area through to larger DIY projects.

I was a little nervous at the beginning of this book. After all, my DIY skills are basically negligible (people remove power tools from my vicinity). However, I could actually find a few projects in this book to do myself.

Though I would absolutely love to be able to create a cat super highway that has ramps and shelves all over the house. I think my kitten would love it but Dyson I think prefers all four paws on the ground.

Overall though this is a great read with lots of great design ideas and it is obvious that the two authors love cats and have their best interests at heart,

Catify to Satisfy: Simple Solutions to Create a Cat Friendly Home is available in Kindle or Paperback form from Amazon.