Weekend (6 Jan, 2013) - Phantom Cat Capers

Weekend (6 Jan, 2013) - Phantom Cat Capers

You all know we have cats. A lot of cats. We love them and we would never think about giving any of them up. Well, there was that time ... oh, and then there was this other time ... ok, maybe we THINK about throwing the whole lot of them out in the street to fend for themselves once in awhile - like every day - but then they’d just hang around and cause even more trouble. Honestly, though, they are like children to us and we take very good care of them.

I think I’ve already mentioned that we have to gone to extraordinary lengths to “cat-proof” our yard. No yard is really 100% cat-proof (unless you are Ernest Hemingway - his house and yards are surrounded by a ten foot concrete wall, and even today the house remains and his six toed cats still have the run of the place). What we’ve done is raised our six foot fence to seven feet using decorative lattice that the cats don’t particularly like. That hasn’t kept two of our more adventurous cats from still getting out of the yard by climbing our two gates (even though both have their front feet declawed).

Well, the city wasn’t going to let me build a ten foot fence, so my next step was to see if I could confuse the cats by making it “seem” like they couldn’t climb the gates. We tried various things that didn’t work. My most recent idea was to use shade cloth to cover the entire gate. The shade cloth hides all of the possible spots they could use to climb the gate, and it’s loose enough that if they try to climb it, the cloth moves. Cats don’t like that unstable feel. So far it’s been working, although they regularly sit by the gate, staring at it in deep thought. Or maybe they were getting ready to upchuck a hairball, it was hard to tell the difference. 

We have indoor challenges as well. There are cats that get along with each other and cats that don’t. We have our older cats - Mom and the “kittens” we kept are now turning 13 - and the younger brood. Keeping the peace is a daily chore. For some time now we have been battling a phantom. Someone or someones, who we have not been able to pin down, has been spraying our furniture. You would not believe the things we’ve tried and still try to stop that. I don’t think there is a single idea we haven’t tried, with varying, but ultimately failed results. Clean up involves a several part process of washing, deodorizing, etc, that does eliminate the stains and the odors, but the irritation factor is pretty high.

We have gone hi tech with our latest attempt, which we put in place last Thursday. We bought a wireless security camera. I’d never used one of these things, so it’s been quite a learning experience. There are all kinds, with all kinds of features, so it took some time just to figure out what to get. I settled on a dLink DCS-942L cloud camera. The installation instructions were terrible, and the phone assistance so overwhelmed I never actually reached a human person. I kept at it and finally got it working.

The camera holds a 32GB micro-SD card (not included, of course, that cost extra) and has numerous and arcane settings. Ours is set for motion detection, and I was pretty pleased at it’s range. The camera can be placed anywhere in the house, or even our yard, as long as it has a power receptacle. We can monitor the video from any computer or even our smart phones. We don’t have to monitor it, though, since the camera automatically captures video whenever motion is detected, runs a one minute clip, and then waits for the next motion.

The video is black and white only, at 640x480 resolution, but the video is quite clear. It has night vision settings as well, but the default settings have worked just fine even with all the lights out. We can only monitor one room at a time, so we chose our front room, as all three pieces of furniture in that room - couch, love seat, and recliner, have been targeted by our phantom. I couldn’t get an angle that covered all three, though, so I settled on monitoring the couch and love seat.

Of course, the first couple of days all of our cats were perfect gentlemen and ladies. There was no spraying anywhere in the house. Then, yesterday morning, in broad daylight, the phantom struck - the recliner. The camera was not aimed at the recliner, and the phantom did not trigger the camera. Sigh.

Saturday morning we moved the camera around found another, better angle. The camera can now see all three pieces of furniture. We set our trap once again and, hopefully, we will nab our phantom.

Of course, we still don’t have an answer about what to do about it when we do catch our phantom.

Stay tuned ....