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?
Cats are territorial, you have to take a bigger shit on top of theirs to show dominance.
This guy dominates.
Drop a stinker on those 4 legged trespassers
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motion activated sprinkler
predator pee scent in your lawn
hot pepper flakes around your lawn
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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/
I want to cull even non-feral ones, like these…
kinda deranged that you want to put a family through the loss of having their pet executed because you are minorly inconvenienced but I guess you’ll probably reap what you sow
To be fair, if the cat lives outside, its nobody’s pet. It’s a roving bird murdering machine.
So if I go outside every once in a while that means I live outside and anyone can movie into my house?
depends are you murdering hobos while your outside in this scenario?
If yes, then your house will be probably be sold to pay for your defense, and someone will move into it.
They clearly don’t care about it that much.
Kinda deranged that people kill many billions of animals annually by letting their cats roam outside. They made their bed.
In most places which have these laws, any cat which is allowed to roam free is considered feral unless it has a collar or something.
And I want to cull people like you. A shame we don’t always get what we want.
Cats should be kept indoors for a variety of reasons, including that they’re one of the largest threats to native species in the world and that they live longer indoors anyways due to the lack of picking up parasites and are at no risk of being preyed upon by larger predators. But to say you want to murder animals en masse just because they don’t understand property laws and do their business outside like… some sort of animal would is absurd, bordering on psychopathic. Might as well sit on your porch with a shotgun on your lap in case somebody’s dog decides to pee on your bushes.
Check your local laws regarding your ability to cull nuisance animals on your property. If these animals are being fed by your neighbors that may cause relationship drama that is worse then a cat shitting in your lawn.
When I lived in the country side, we never had feral cat problems, if your cat ran outside, it would disappear ( probably eaten by cayotes ) in a few days.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
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!
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.
Accept that animals shit outside.
Cool, Imma just let a dog shit on your lawn and when you get annoyed you can just accept that dogs shit outside.
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Cats hate citrus peels and red pepper/chili powder or flakes. They will stay away.
I’m sure a lawn mower wouldn’t turn that into a war crime. I’m sure their neighbors would have no problem with this.
I do this all the time so unknown animals leave my garden alone. To me it smells great and the one time a neighbor asked I said it was roundup then said it was a joke and it’s actually tropicals fertilizer. Nobody has ever complained about spicy air.
I am not a lawyer but this sounds like terrible advice.
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I know that there are certain laws against booby trapping your property, for example. As I said, I don’t know the specifics but that’s what it made me think of.
I don’t think it counts as a booby trap. The intended mechanism is not burning the cat. The chillis will smell and the smell with keep the cat away.
It is not hidden with a trigger, or another thing to throw the chillis at the cat (or small children.) That would a booby trap.
I am not a proctologist, but this sounds like a shitty question.
Sprinkle catnip all over a neighbor you don’t like (the owner?) yard.
Maybe that’s what the neighbour did to op lol
@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.
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
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.
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.
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
It’s the narrow thought process of one who has always lived in the she spot, I would imagine.
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.
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.
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.
Easy. Get rid of the lawn. Animals live outside. If it’s not this cat, it’ll be something else.
Put in a sand pit somewhere you are ok with them shitting. Training domesticated cats is an undertaking that in my limited experience comes down to giving them an option they’d prefer over their current behavior. Trying to dissuade a feral cat from shitting where they please humanely seems like a loosing battle.
I am OK with them shitting not on my property. If I’d wanted cat shit, I’d get a cat. I don’t, so I don’t. These aren’t feral cats.
The irony being that cats don’t shit in their own gardens, best way to stop getting cat shit in your garden is to get a cat.
It’s best to just trap them and relocate them far far away. Or bring them to whatever shelter will sell these cats to more families that will then have more outdoor cats.
I m sure my neighbors will be sad. And later get a new cat.
Don’t take your neighbours pet away. Don’t punish an animal that doesn’t know it’s doing anything wrong, punish the owner… by reporting them. Or relocating the cat shit to their front step. Or you can start by just talking to them
It’s not a pet if they let it roam and don’t even know where the hell the thing is or what it’s doing. They are the neglectful owners and shouldn’t have a pet. Keep your cats indoors or risk losing them.
The neighbors will be sure to tell their cat to stop shitting in the lawn. The cat will listen, and stop, surely.
Kill enough of them and they’ll stop getting new ones.
Don’t kill it. Just rehome it or relocate it to the wilderness far away where it can live in nature like the ‘owners’ want anyways
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It’s actually worse then that, they’ll take it and dump it in a field somewhere to destroy the ecosystem there by introducing an invasive species.
We bought a couple of plants that have a smell that allegedly repels cats and other animals and had good results planting them around our patches. But we also left the dog in the garden more often which might have helped even more. The plants are called plectranthus ornatus … but there are others which might also work: https://horticulture.co.uk/cat-deterrent-plants/
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
