He's climbed the curtains again !

[BookWorm45]

Hello lovely cat-focussed MNers,

I have a beautiful and very active kitten, 5 months old. We've had him for about 1 week (rehomed from Cats Protection).

He has a lot of toys, including scratching posts and cat trees, plus the run of our entire house. We play with him a lot (ping pong balls, fishing rod toys, shoelaces !). We aren't letting him out yet (we haven't had him for long enough) but we do intend to allow him out into our garden via a cat flap in about a month's time.

So he's found a new game which is to climb up the curtains in our bedroom. He scrambles up madly to the top, then comes down again. of course this is not doing the curtain fabric any good and I can see it is getting picked (so far he is mostly climbing up the inside of them, so the picked fabric threads aren't too visible yet). This is also very funny (as well as slightly annoying).

Is there anything you would advise that has helped with deterring cats going up the curtains ? Or do you consider he will just grow out of it ?

Plus obligatory pic !

Only advice i have? Get rid of the curtains! That's what we had to do. Our girl cat loved climbing them but our livingroom ones were 9ft long and shes get herself up on the curtain pole and then not come down. So the curtains had to go!

In my experience, you can't stop kittens climbing curtains. Either shut him out of the bedroom or take the curtains down until he's a bit older.

He's an absolutely beautiful kitten - he looks very intelligent too.

Aww, he's lovely. A cats instinct it's to climb up. It's good for their health. Get him a cat tree or a barrel? Or access to somewhere high to get up to and perch. I've got one of these www.zooplus.co.uk/shop/cats/scratching_posts/scratch_barrels/194645 in my bedroom, but I've got shutters, not curtains

OMG!!! Cute kitten alert!

He is gorgeous - send him round to ours and I will allow him to climb our curtains - no problem

I think I could forgive him anything.

However when ours was a baby, spraying the curtains with citrus scented furniture polish and placing gaffer tape in strips from above arm head height to the floor helped. When I took it off a few months later, he had stopped doing it. He only did it in the drawing room where we had huge bays and very high ceilings so we had to do something. By 6 months he could jump up to work and door handle .

He's 13 now and sadly sometimes misses when he tries to jump onto the kitchen counter.

They're his curtains now op.

My cat used to do this. She's too big and heavy to get up there now. I see her sometimes sitting at the bottom of the curtains looking wistfully up.

Trim his claws, my adult cat still climbs the blinds when she gets the chance, despite having a cat tree and wall shelves to climb.

Nothing you can do. You need to send him straight to me to save your poor curtains

He is so cute! Sorry that's unhelpful

Thank you everyone. I think I will take your advice and take the curtains down for a while (they are curtains which go over a wardrobe area). We definitely need to keep the main curtains up as the bedroom looks out onto a road. Maybe will try putting them up again when he's a year old or so.

This is such a change having a kitten ! My last cat died about a year ago and was aged about 15.

So another gratuituous picture just because.....

Ooh, they're so cute when they go long like that!

Awwww those eyes

We got our cat at a year old as I can’t deal with kitten mania and he still gave climbing curtains a go! And by then he was HEAVY.

He’s very cute, I wonder if he’s got a bit of Bengal in him, they are very lively cats.

Get blinds.

Oh and I know it is early but what do you think is going to happen if you put a tree up for Xmas?

It’s a lost cause, I’m afraid
This is the lining of the curtains in my living room. Plus one of the perpetrators

Thinking about it, my mother had a cat who got into the habit of ripping and scratching the underside of her mattress on her bed - in between the slats. The fragments of fabric looked like the curtain linings in Bengals photo above !

Mine would scale up the hallway wall when he was younger. We had this dark horrible tacky embossed wallpaper that I was desperate to get rid off cos it made the hall look so dark and dingy, but my exH liked it. Soon got my own way when DCat started tearing it down in strips sliding back down the wall again. He scramble up when he knew no one wasn't looking and then once at the top would miaow to get our attention then side eye you whilst slowly sliding back down the wall. Same Cat also created himself a Kitty window in the blinds. Thankfully he's calmed down a lot now he's older and prefers to spend his days sleeping and cuddling with Mummy

When I had kittens, we had midnight blue velvet curtains in the living room. By the time the kittens were grown, the curtains looked like a starry sky with all the pin-pricks and scratches in them!

Ha ha , from this point on blinds or shutters are your friends, there's no way to stop him climbing the curtains.

He is gorgeous though OP, well worth a less than perfect pair of curtains (or two)!

Ooh that's a kitty with evil on his mind! Lovely boy.

Our cats are 18 months now but the day before we picked them up I replaced our ridiculously expensive curtains with the old ones which fortunately I'd kept. Thank God I did. They also trashed the wallpaper in the hall but that was due for replacement anyway.

My kittens got a very firm 'No!' When they did something they weren't supposed to (e.g. climb curtains, get on dining table, bite my toes! etc). It worked quite well, although they would still do it occasionally! They soon get too heavy for curtain climbing though...

Many years back I had a Burmese cat that loved swinging from net curtains. She also loved climbing up the flock wallpaper too.

@ChequerBoard

Ha ha , from this point on blinds or shutters are your friends, there's no way to stop him climbing the curtains.

He is gorgeous though OP, well worth a less than perfect pair of curtains (or two)!

Have you not had to extricate a cat from between the blinds?

Mine eventually learned how to get behind them, but it was a lengthy learning curve for him.