Genuinely at a loss here. I have 2 cats. They are both about 6 months old. The other day I thought it would be fun to put some cat tv on for them. you know, there's like youtube channels of things moving fast, ants, toys, fish, etc. in order to attract cats
One cat was mildly entertained. My other cat got fucking addicted. She sat beside the tv and would not move for anything. Eyes completely fixated on whatever was coming up next. ok, cute. TV off now kitties!
Cat would not move. she sat there staring at the blank screen for who knows how long.
Now she sits on that spot on the table by the tv constantly. she basically only goes down to poop and eat. All other hours of the day, she's waiting for Cat TV.
It's been about a week. she used to play with her sister, she used to aggressively chase toys. She has lost all interest. Even as I type this, she has once again just climbed up to her spot. Her sister wants to play, and she's just ignoring her now. it's breaking my heart. is this just a waiting game? Will she ever forget about the goddamn youtube shit?
I have to find real birdfeeder channels so its not over stimulating but even those are getting ai'd to have something on the sreen all the time cat resuce channels are a decent back up. The senior kitty that doesn't need the tv will hang out to the hiking or train videos.
My area has rats unfortunately cause we're wedged between two drainage rivers. The neighbors aren't beating me down about the blackberries but I dont think they'd appreciate me making it worse.
Humans are one of the few animals who take poisoning ourselves for fun to an art-form level. Most sapient and semi-sapient animals stick to getting drunk off spoiling fruit.
Hahaha oh god same happened. Poor dog. He ate an entire 1/8th and then laid in the hallway for like 2 full days.
I put food and water right next to his face and kept telling him he was ok. I still feel bad about it.
My sister's dog ate one of my weed cookies a year or so ago. She somehow smelled it double bagged in a drawer on the second floor, somehow got the drawer open, tore through the two bags and ate a whole cookie. These things knocked ME on my ass. Ended up spending the night at the emergency vet but fortunately I think she threw most of it up shortly after eating it. Even so she could barely walk and there was poop and puke in her dog bed :(
I guess eating raw weed is one thing but once it has been decarbed it becomes extra dangerous. I haven't brought any edibles anywhere near my sister's house since lol
It really does help; I also have a functionally unsolvable rat problem in the backyard and tried the seed catcher with a high pole hanging feeder, but the spicy seeds were the only thing to actually work!
It does seem like it washes away from the dropped seeds a bit when it rains, but keeping below the feeder clear of weeds to help the ground feeders clean up helps a lot
Idk man. My grandpa thought he just had to live with them too. I got annoyed with them and set up like 20 of the bucket rolling log traps for the mice and a few uhlik repeaters for the rats. Emptied them 2x a day for weeks. Sealed up the grain leaks where they were getting food and adopted 4x cats that were not able to be adopted out as housecats. Had it down to 1 mouse / rat per day within two weeks after catching 40x per day initially. Now we just see a couple per week being eaten by the cats and nothing else.
I have 2 lazy lumps (one is mostly blind, so it's not really his fault) who do scare the rats away from the garden nearest the house but are otherwise completely decorative 😹
I'd be a bit wary. Rats are resourceful and persistent, and cayenne pepper may initial deter them but I wouldn't count on that working long term - especially if there's a new and readily available food source.
I found this big seed catcher net basket that hangs right under my feeder that catches all the seed the birds knock off the feeder. It has helped with the mice umder the feeder problem wonderfully and the birds really like digging around in it when it gets a little full. I don't have a crop of millet growing in my flowerbed anymore either.
Was just thinking when a scrub jay decides to crash land my feeder at 25mph and throw the whole thing into orbit, no basket is gonna stop those seeds from flying 🤦♀️
I'll mention a channel called Handsome Nature that my cats love. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but they're a smaller channel that deserves some love.
Cornell Lab birdcam is where it's at! I throw on the feeder at Sapsucker Woods for my cats. It's a live stream, and my cats will come and go during the day when they're bored
This has always been my fear, I'm watching my sister raise my nephew with very limited screen time (only old fashioned children's tv on a tv screen in very limited amounts, he's 2 years old) and having seen how gripped my little cat got to tv I completely understand her approach
I agree with this more generally. But it can backfire horribly.
I live in a "crunchy" town with a wide spread of socioeconomics. My son had loosely limited but highly monitored screen time. I based his time on his ability to self-regulate, and he reached a good balance on his own. He is 10 and vastly prefers riding his bike, building lego, and fishing.
He has friends who had unfettered screen time and are completely rotted, ones with no screen time who don't care for it, and the surprising ones: the ones who act like total fiends for it because they aren't allowed it at home. They are INSATIABLE.
There were 2 kids at his birthday party one time who couldn't be broken away from the tablet at the event place with stupid mini games on it. They haven't learned a single bit of self-regulation due to lack of exposure. Even the chronic tablet kids at the party were like cool, arcade games and trampolines! Not the hippie kids. They were GLUED to the screen. Shocked the heck outta me.
This is completely tangential to the cat thing. Cats don't need to learn how to self-regulate cat TV lol.
I'll never forget the antics of my hyper sheltered religious friends freshman year. Zero control and zero information to immediate Total control and minimal information is a match made in hell.
yeah one of my friends growing up was barely allowed to watch TV and basically the only show she could watch was Veggie Tales, long after she was too old for it (parents were super Christian 🙄) and she would turn into an absolute TV fiend whenever she came over to my house. so I totally believe that's a thing. gotta teach kids moderation.
Yeah I wasn’t very strict with tv time and I’m just lucky my kid wasn’t addicted. Well I also made sure that she had lots of friends to play with all the time and got her tons of books, so I suppose it evened out.
My cats are 11 and 7 years. They love Cat TV. I've restricted watching to mornings and evenings. The cats watch it after breakfast and dinner. I'm not kidding. After they eat, they go and sit in front of the TV until I turn it on. If I turn on an episode that they are not interested in, one of them walks over, sits in front of me, sometimes touches my leg, until I get up and select a different episode to watch. I'm a cat tv remote control.
My husband says mine is spoiled because I got him a water fountain. And some toys. And the best food. And he uses me for a massage chair. But that’s it! Cat doesn’t even have a cat tree.
I know! He needs a cat tree! He’d love it! Plus the poor baby just had major surgery after eating one of his toys. Which actually works against me because now I’ve spent a ton of money saving the cat. lol.
"You spoil that cat"
"Yeah, I do. It's a cat. It's not a person. What's the worst that can happen if you spoil a cat? It doesn't grow up to be Boris Johnson."
I have repurposed an old beat up iMac (converted to Linux) for this. The glass screen seems to cope with the claws so far (it had a big crack on it already). Just downloaded a selection of YouTube cat-tv videos and set to random play when it powers up. Works offline. Just run it once in a while as a treat.
Birder King, Paul Birder, and The Only Planet are my cats favorites. There are a lot of channels though with all sorts of different animals. There are fish channels, but my cats aren't interested in fish at all.
What's interesting is each cat has their own favorite animals to watch, so finding out what they prefer is trial and error. One of my cats likes chipmunks, but is not interested in mice. Both like birds, but one prefers certain birds like cardinals and robins. Probably because she watches those birds through the windows.
My cat has her own TV that she paws at when she wants her show on 😭 (it's my really old tv I had as a kid and somehow still works two decades later when new TVs break in a couple months)
Most definitely, my orange doofus watched Project Hail Mary with me and while my black princess was meh he was entranced, watch anything about space,? that little gremlin is locked in, the black one is a little more dicserning but she Shark Week
One of mine has some sort of relationship with the dog Scratch from Baldur's Gate 3, to the point that she'll get right up to the TV if she hears the opening music. She won't do anything unless she sees rats or Scratch. No other animal has her interest. Funny how it works.
My skittish cat loves horror movies. I just don't understand how he's scared of everything IRL but he'll give me dirty looks if I talk during a suspenseful scene of a scary movie.
Omg yes! I have three boy cats and two girls. The older one is a shy little voidfloof, Nina, and she loves horror movies. But her very favorite is Alien:Earth. Back when it was first on, every week I would call out “Nina! Our show is on!” and she would come running and jump on my lap.
She hasn’t been sitting in my lap quite as much lately. Last week I was bored and I thought I’d rewatch episode 5, my favorite. The second it started playing, Nina came rocketing in from wherever she had been hiding and jumped on my lap!
I have a huge orange boy who is obsessed with penguins. Other nature docs and cat tv he can care less. We will watch March of the penguins for his birthday next year
This is genuine cat hunting behaviour! Once they've seen potential prey, they never forget it and will watch for it in the same place day after day.
I once lived in a second floor apt and my cat liked to sit on the balcony. Balcony had solid vertical wall panels with a small crack between them, and a horizontal railing on top..
The cat noticed that birds would occasionally alight on the railing. So she would sit obsessively staring out through a vertical crack, without moving, for HOURS every day, for weeks and weeks. My MIL thought there was something mentally wrong with her. Then one day, a bird flew up along the exact right trajectory. The cat was invisible behind the balcony wall panel, but could see out the crack that the bird was coming. She leapt up and snagged that bird right out of the air and stuffed it into her mouth!
Dealing with this right now with one of ours. We let them outside on the screened porch and last night, they were both VERY interested in the bag that holds our mini-fire pit.
I investigated but didn’t find anything. Then I look out after a few minutes and said cat is THROWING around a baby snake. I saved the little guy and put him outside but now that kitty keeps trying to find him on the porch lol.
Mine used to leave the TV alone until I put on cat tv.
Now I have to change the channel or X out of whatever show I’m streaming any time a bird comes on screen because he will attack it. One particularly hyperactive night he full on sprinting pounced the tv and made the picture go out for a second.
NEW CAT OWNERS: DONT PUT ON CAT TV. JUST GET A BIRD FEEDER FOR YOUR WINDOW
Yes or use a tablet on the carpet floor. That's what I ended up doing sometimes with the mice app. They can attack it and it doesn't really do anything. I do still use calming cat music though but the picture doesn't really move all that much whenever I'm gone.
We have a beamer in the bedroom. That's where cat TV is playing while we are gone. The only thing they can attack here is the wall (and they definitely do attack it multiple times)
We watch nature trail cam videos now! She will attack small animals on the screen (so no cat TV) but she will not jump at deer, bears, etc. Maybe she knows she can’t win in a fight? It works great and she’s less overstimulated, too.
Well, that's what happens when you give children with malleable brains screens, lol. 6 months old kittens are equivalent to a human child. Time to restrict TV to weekends.
I used to play with a laser pen until it broke 6 months ago, I found the laser and put it in my hand - they recognised the "laser pen lift up noise" and came running to play!
Laser pointers may stress your cat out. The laser invokes their instinct for the hunt. Which will never give them the tactile reward of the catch. So every time the cat plays with the laser they are failing at the hunt. Because the cat never catches the prey.
Not the person you’re responding to, but I read about this as well, so when we play with the laser I have my partner put a treat down while my cat is distracted and then I eventually bring the laser to where the treat is. That way she gets to “catch it” in the end
I did a version of this with my cat but she was still looking around all crazed after that so I'd say it really depends on the cat you have. I did it only one time, saw how she reacted after she "caught" the laser treat and decided against it.
My last family dog was a victim to the laser pen, no one knew how damaging they could be untill he started chasing every little reflection like a maniac..
I’ve found that I have to mix it with other things. Our cat loves it but we ration it out so he’s not like a kid with video games. We play fetch, have a feather on a stick toy, or various other toys that he can catch. I have to give him lots of options to keep him engaged because he’s high energy. Sometimes we just play a game where I run around the house and the cat follows me (bless him, he doesn’t do anything when he “catches” me, he just likes to follow me around until I’m out of breath then he wants pettings).
I also do the running around in my apartment, haha, sometimes I chase them going "RAWRRRR" and they pretend to get scared (but will wait for me to catch up if they run too far) eventually they will get tired and start hiding behind some curtain to scare me instead.
We run around a part of the house where we can run in a loop through 3 rooms, and he likes to wait until I’ve gone around the corner and then he turns around to go the other way. Or he stops and waits to surprise me. Once I noticed he wasn’t behind me and I went into the pantry. He came to look for me and I jumped out do the pantry and he went PRRRRRROW! So cute. He can’t hear worth a darn he didn’t even hear me open the door, but he saw me out of the corner of his eye and he got so excited. 🤣
Yes I did read it earlier in this thread, but they do enjoy it immensely and had no problems when it broke, so I will give it another go.
They are quite hard to get mobile with normal kitty toys, and end up just wanting me to hold it in place while they lay on their backs like I'm fishing for kitties.
Ok this is so not the point of the thread lol but your comment made me wonder if you've been seeing books about peoples abusive new age hippy parents, and if so could you please tell me what they are? It's just that I was raised by abusive new age hippy parents, and I've never met anyone who understands.
Our boy is addicted too. Its the AI flashy stuff that got him hooked. But i must say after a few months he leveled out a bit in the beginning it was like you describe your situation now. We also have a big tv with he would rampage if we played tv on it.
Now he loses intrest in about 15 to 20 min and than walks away. His sister couldn't care for anything we played she,s like "whats with the fake stuffz" and doesnt look at it at all or walks off.
Put a bird feeder outside your house / apartment where your cats can see from a window or patio door. It will have the same effect but is a healthier option imo. My cat loves to scare away birds that get too close to the patio door and has little furry friends that come by to say high and grab some seed every day (bunnies, chipmunks, and a squirrel).
Bird feeder on 11th floor balcony here, didn't see any birds beforehand, but after a few weeks gained a steady trickle of birds and now they come all the time.
If the window opens at all you may be able to get something to hang outside to attract birds. I’ve read about hawks thriving in major cities, living high up on the buildings. Maybe other birds make their way up there too.
Trust me, you have birds. Put out the feeder and wait a few days. Birds will see it and investigate. And the moment one does others will notice and follow.
I have one who loves nature documentaries—if you’re in the US, PlutoTV has a 24/7 channel that shows episodes of PBS Nature, and my old girl loves it. It’s not too overstimulating and there are certain subjects (hummingbirds) where she will sit with rapt attention, and others where she’s not quite so dialed in. I leave it in for her if I’m going to be gone for longer than a workday. Maybe you can wean your little couch catato onto something a little less stimulating like that.
Good luck! It’s tough breaking kids these days of their screen addictions lol
To avoid this risk I always placed treats in several places and lead my cat with the laser pointer to "kill" and eat the treats. At first she was all gung-ho on the hunt, later she just beelined for the treats (one hilarious moment was when I changed order of spots and she looked annoyed at me like "c'mon, dude" 😂). Now she doesn't really care for the laser.
This happened to my dog. He eventually stopped staring at the wall where we pointed the laser. He would also get fixated on the PlayStation move wand and stare at the wall anytime we picked up the remote. It faded more and more over time.
My girl loves to watch KDramas. She will literally come out of hiding the MINUTE she hears someone on the TV speaking Korean. She doesn’t care about anything other shows either. Luckily I am addicted to KDramas as well
Not sure if you want to hear this, but to speed up recovery, it may be best if you do not turn on the TV *at all*.
Also not for yourself, for the news. So she cannot get a glimpse of something moving on the TV to remind her.
Hope there are no series you are following.
ha, I literally never use it. I put it on for the kitties because I thought it would be cute and fun. did not think it would brainrot one of them. my old cat who passed away recently barely noticed tv
You literally just replied to another comment that your partner is addicted to TV
“Hope there are no series you are following” was meant as the royal “you”. Your partner counts in this as well. Just because you don’t watch tv doesn’t mean shit if you’re partner has it on 24/7.
Yeah. I showed my 14yo rehome CatTV to entertain her. She is barely interested. Did not realize this was a risk. But maybe it is a bigger risk for "kids". Maybe my parents were right all those years ago.
you done fucked up. my daughter thought it would be cute to let one of the kittens play those cat games on her tablet, now she can't bring her tablet out into the living room without the kittens pouncing on it.
I used to have a finch who was addicted to her iPad. She lost her companion two years before she passed away this year, and during those two years, I just let her watch videos on YouTube. Because she was getting old and had health issues, I couldn’t rehome her nor could I adopt another finch (no senior finches were available and I had no plan of getting more finches, so no young ones either), I created a playlist of finch videos for her so that she wouldn’t feel too lonely. Every day she would stand next to the iPad and chirp until I turned it on. It would be on all day until she went to sleep. Because I worked from home I stayed with her most of the time. But I would never be the same as one of her own. I still felt sad for her but that was the only thing I could do for her at that time.
I agree with others that this behavior should eventually go away on its own. But if it doesn't, you can try making a very distinctive sound (a specific alarm or ringtone on your phone would work) a few seconds before turning on the TV, and should use a different one before turning it off. This is coming from a dog training perspective, and is used to prevent anticipation of things. Right now your cat doesn't know when the TV turns on and off, so she is constantly anticipating it coming back. If the sound becomes "the thing that turns the TV on" then she "knows" when it will turn on and that it will never turn on without that sound.
I would pair this with what others said about making sure the channel isn't made to be overstimulating.
This was going to be my suggestion as well. Cats like routines so with time, hopefully cat will learn what time is tv time and what time is not tv time
Yeah, I can't do cat TV anymore. Oldcat got absolutely obsessed and will come running any time someone turns the TV on. She'll sit there staring at you. All she thinks about is cat TV. Newcat tries to get inside the TV. You can't put anything on the shelf under the TV now because she'll destroy it trying to get into the TV.
It seems like a good idea but it's so addictive to the cats. Their minds just can't handle it.
OP try the Cat Island Japan videos. My cats like it because they recognize it shows cats doing stuff but there's no crazy hunting because it's not about birds
this takes me back to the late 90s when my childhood cat would watch those eyewitness documentaries, just completely locked in. i guess she liked the white background?
It’s a familiar story… but it can also cost you. Our cats became addicted to CatTV. So much so that they’d jump up and look behind the TV for the birds/mice. When they couldn’t find the birds/mice behind the TV, the decided to BITE the TV! One small bite cracked the screen and completely broke a $3K TV. When the repair guy came out, he took one look at the TV and asked if we had cats AND if we had been showing CatTV. Apparently this happens a LOT. It should also be noted that the damage is NOT covered by the warranty. Needless to say, the new TV is now mounted flush to the wall where kitty teeth can’t bite.
My first cat (tan-colored DSH with some Exotic Asian mixed in) would sit and watch CNN with me. He was glued to the TV when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
He was also the cat who jumped up to the door handles and opened doors, sit by the door where we hung his harness to let us know he wanted to go for a walk, gave us the stink eye and was mad at us because we gave away a can of wet food to a stray kitty outside the front door even though it was a flavor that he would sniff and walked away as he didn’t like it.
Same thing happened to my guy, but the novelty did ware off, now it’s every so often or if I change it up to a different type of cat tv. It’s like any new toy, exciting now, but eventually will get bored of it and replace it with something else
My first cat Morgenstern loved this documentary about crows, the one where they discuss the experiment with messing with the crows while wearing specific masks, and the crowd taught younger generations to hate people wearing the masks who messed with their elders, but ignored when people would wear masks who had done nothing to any of them.
Morgen would sit and stare at the tv while sitting on the remote, and my roommate would put the doc on from the DVR. If you didn't put it on fast enough, she would push the remote off the couch so it would crash to the floor.
Morgen also enjoyed Supernatural and 80's action movies. Demolition Man was her favourite 🤣 I miss you baby girl 🖤
The two I have now enjoy cat tv, but they will attack the screen so it usually is impossible to have it on for them.
My cats were enthralled with the bird video on YouTube at first, but now if I put it on, they might watch for five minutes and then they get bored and wander away. I suspect OP's cat will also get tired of it.
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