Neighborhood cats shit right in the middle of my lawn. It stinks and the robot lawn mover makes it even worse.
I do NOT like cats, and this is not helping.
What works to keep them from shitting on my lawn?
The votes have spoken. Some people are cat lovers; thanks for the great advice from the rest of you! I will not go out of my way to accommodate other people’s pets that aren’t welcome on my property. My first weapon of choice will be chili because it’s simple and cheap. Other ideas have been noted.
Cats are territorial, you have to take a bigger shit on top of theirs to show dominance.
Drop a stinker on those 4 legged trespassers
While not breaking eye contact
A motion activated or retomely deployable sprinkler system would work wonders. No need for drenching the critter, just interrupt or annoy the cat. After a few forced baths, the cat would associate shitting on your lawn with getting wet and just move to safer grounds.
motion activated sprinkler
predator pee scent in your lawn
hot pepper flakes around your lawn
put trap boxes out with bait inside, catch the cat
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depending on your jurisdiction, but especially in rural and farm areas you may be permitted to cull feral animals on your property.
In ecologically sensitive areas, (basically Islands, the Americas, Australia) cats are a invasive species, and put local small animal species in extreme danger. There may be a government program to assist in your effort. i.e. Australia’s Cat Free Kangroo Island initiative https://conservationbytes.com/2021/05/20/killing-feral-cats-quickly-and-efficiently/
Fuck the downvotes, do this.
It’s pretty amazing to me how angry people get about dogs pooping in their yards and owners not picking it up when anyone with a cat who ever lets it out makes zero effort to keep that cat from pooping in other people’s yards and most people don’t seem to mind.
The older the cat, the less they bury their excrement. Sometimes it’s just enough to obscure it so you step in it. Sometimes it’s notburried at all. It’s so much more offensive to me than dog poop that I have to assume there’s some sort of genetic marker that some of you lack that makes me smell it as one of the most foul smells i’ve ever experienced. I’ve lived next to someone with 20 some cats and barely any yard and they made it completely impossible to enjoy my yard at all, and unlike dogs putting up a fence does nothing.
Robot lawnmower… Damn
Lawn mover!
All these psychopaths saying kill the cat or catch it and relocate it are fucking deranged. Talk to the owners if you know who it is… firstly, I’m sure they would at least be receptive to the problem and if they’re not then maybe look into legal outlets. If you’ve gone out of your way to post on lemmy you’re technically savvy enough to look up local laws. people have also posted actual remediation methods that aren’t terrible and could actually improve your lawn in some scenarios as well so maybe try those out if you’re into them.
I’m positive that no one wants to lose a pet in any capacity. Just some simple communication with the owners could solve this, and if not, there are other options.
Sorry you’re going through this though, shit sucks. Pun intended.
I can 100% guarantee you that the owners will just be extremely confused about the idea that people might not want other people’s “pets” in their yard. I can 100% guarantee you that the response will just be “well it’s a cat.”
And it means that if something ever happens to this small animal, OP will get blamed for it if he says anything to the neighbors.
100%?
Yeah, I’ve dealt with this situation before. People who let cats roam free like this seem to live in a world where there is precisely one socially acceptable exception to otherwise generally accepted neighborly decorum - cats. Suggesting that you don’t want their cat on your property makes you the asshole in their eyes, because they literally cannot comprehend any solution to the problem. Obviously the sky is blue, and cats are allowed to shit wherever they want. Thus spake the toxoplasmosis.
Place a box with sand near the area you want to protect. Move it further away a feet or so by day. In 10 days that cat will be shitting wherever you guided it to. Leave the box and or the sand. Done.
Low cost. Low effort. No animal cruelty. No dealing with neighbor. Effective.
Using this method, OP could guide the cat poop in the owner’s yard.
@PlutoniumAcid i’m 64, i’ve lived in over a hundred different places, including rural and suburbs with lawns. literally never ever had this problem. not even when i owned cat! so it seems you’re cursed. you need to find the witch or wizard you offended and make amends.
i’m really amazed this would even happen, as cat prefer to bury their waste so they like places they can dig miles more than lawns. i wonder: did your u maybe see one cat, once, poop and now you think all poop is cat poop? because dogs are a lot more likely to be doing this regularly than cats.
Elderly cats don’t bury their shit. A neighbour’s cat used to bury stealth bombs in my garden until he got too old and decrepit to bother. The pinnacle was a gross runny shit on top of a creeping thyme. I was thrilled when he died, but then she got a young feisty cat that slaughters birds. Sigh.
In general, many feral cats do not bury their shit. I have no idea why people keep saying this like it’s a fact - I have dealt with this exact same, well, shit at several places I’ve lived. Most of the time it is cats shitting in the raised beds, but I have also seen some who like a certain plot of grass or weeds.
yeah, cats bury their shit. they don’t shit on grass and leave it exposed.
only time cats shit in the open is to prove a point. OP probably pissed off this cat
I wouldn’t trust anyone whose lived in a hundred different places about anything at all
Can you explain this a bit? I am having a hard time understanding how living in different places would make someone less informed. I would assume the opposite by default, but I’m interested in your thought process.
It’s the narrow thought process of one who has always lived in the she spot, I would imagine.
I’m guessing that their thought process is something akin to, if they have had to hop THAT much, their judgement can’t be good since if it were, they would have settled before reaching the high number of 100. I don’t agree, but that’s my guess
Are you sure it’s cats?
Have you seen the cats pooping or just sniffing the poop?
Depends where you are, but foxes would be a more likely bet. Fox poop stinks too - really foul stuff. Cat poop generally is quite inocuos once it drys out, although a lawn mowing bot slicing it up would make sense for making it worse.
I have never heard of cats pooping in the middle of a lawn before. Normally they like private and safe spaces to poop as they’re vulnerable when pooping, and normally they’re fastidious about burying it where possible.
iF it really is cats, then maybe get a gravel section next to your lawn that they might prefer to go in? A litter box essentially.
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Sure looks like a cat to me.
motion detection water sprinkler?
- might be the most harmless and probably affordable
That seems like the way to go for sure. On top of being affordable, it’s quick to set up, safe, should work quickly, and can quickly be taken down to return the lawn to normal. Or quickly put back in place if necessary.
This is the one. If you’re tech-savvy you could probably find a way to activate a cheap wifi valve based on motion detection from your camera. Otherwise, there’s this: https://www.orbitonline.com/products/yard-enforcer-motion-activated-sprinkler
Plant some lemongrass.
When that shows to only be partially effective, accept the fact that you can’t control the ongoings of the world in every fashion.
Don’t some varieties of Lemon Grass kill cats? Something about shutting down their liver if eaten.
My parents used to have this problem with dogs (our neighbors loved to let them shit everywhere but their own yard) and had a great amount of success with lining the perimeter of the property with moth balls.
What do the moth balls do?
Apparently, fuck up the environment, so forget I said anything
Smell
For dog poop I remove it and sprinkle coffee grounds on top to confuse the scent.
Easy. Get rid of the lawn. Animals live outside. If it’s not this cat, it’ll be something else.
Get a dog
Cat shits in garden at night. Dog is in garden during day, eating and rolling in the cat shit.
Source: my dog.
There was an old woman who purchased a dog.
I saw a guy on YouTube make an automated water turret that shoots the water hose (not a water gun, but the actual hose) at anything that the camera recognized as a cat on his lawn. It was awesome. I tried finding the video, but can’t remember his name.
Side note on the chili idea, it doesn’t really work on many shorthaired cats. Neither does cayenne pepper powder. [E] That was a problem I had at a previous house. I had a neighborhood cat that kept meowing hella loud in the middle of the night right outside my window. The cayenne and chili actually attracted him and more cats, and I ended up with three visiting cats, instead of the one original. Just be aware this could be your fate, too, if you use foodstuffs.
I think your looking for I Did A Thing’s video.
Plant non toxic cat repellant plants:
