[massa]

hi, my gilfriend wants to get a kitten, we already have a one year old lab who i think would get along fine with a kitten as he is well socialised but my fear is that when i was young we had a kitten and it scrached all the furniture and i dont want to have the leather suite ripped to ribbons! is this a common thing with kittens, can it be stopped or was it just a bad experience with the kitten i had when i was young?

[joyfull]

sorry not got cats but Caralou has loads of experience with them so hopefully she will soon be on to offer advice and perhaps even a little one   

[spottymint]

Hi

I think it's mainly a bad experience with your old kitten, but like all animals, they need training.

We have a rescue cat, who clawed carpets, we provided many scratching post and trained her using praise to use them. The carpet scratching stopped.

Our other rescue started on the leather sofa, but again shouting at wrong doing & praise on the posts worked wonders.

We have had a few scratches on the leather chairs, mainly because one cat is clumsy & no natural balance. She is also a scardy cat, jumps at noises & digs her claws in.

[Snap Dragon]

When my 2 were kittens they made quite a few scratches on the leather 3 piece... not on purpose but because they naturally like to jump and climb and aren't always big enough to make it up onto the sofa and so they use their claws to climb the rest of the way!

Unfortunately I think ths is a kitten thing and cannot be avoided. We put throws over our sofas but the claws still went through! I'm just grateful they never did the curtain climbing thing too!!!

Older cats do tend to scratch (mine tend to do the carpets) but as spottymint says if you provided a post for them they are normally easily convinced ti use it.

Good luck