Six year old cat started scratching furniture

[Mañanarama]

Our cat used to scratch the living daylights out of our wooden dining chairs so we got new ones and left him one old one in the garden to use. All good, worked a treat for years.

He’s six now and in the last month he’s taken to scratching a dining table leg, but even worse, our wooden bed, which is probably the most expensive thing in the house.

I’ve been looking online at repellents - seems lemongrass might work and there are loads of sprays. But would natural lemongrass do? I’m reluctant to spray the bed with anything chemical. Alternatively there is sticky film which they apparently hate touching.

I’m willing to try anything before he ruins our beautiful bed, any other ideas?

Will he allow you to trim his claws? I feel your pain. My usually impeccably behaved Persian has taken to looking me straight in the eye and scratching my leather sofa. Despite having a perfectly good scratching post!

Get a couple of big chunky scratching posts. You’ve taught him to scratch chairs, so he’s scratching chairs.

By leaving him an old dining chair to scratch, you've essentially taught him scratch wooden furniture 😉

After several years of use, I suspect the chair in the garden is now too battered to be effective which is why he's hunting for alternatives in the house.

Does he have access to lots of scratching posts?

I trim my cats claws on a regular basis - look on youtube for tutorial and special cat claw clippers can be bought from amazon.
My cats only scratch stuff round the house if I let the claws get too long.

Get some new scratchers? Mine have a really long tall one they like plus a couple of curved ones. Sprinkle occasionally with catnip to get their interest, but they do need replacing occasionally as they get scratched out.

Thanks all, I have bought scratching posts but he’s just not interested! He’s due his annual check up soon so I will get them to check his claws, they might need a trim though we’ve never had to have that done before (he doesn’t mind me filing them, though!)

Our cat isn't interested in traditional scratching posts (the ones with rope coiled round them) but loves those scratching boxes made from corrugated cardboard.

He's not a massive one for scratching furniture but he did make a beeline for one corner of the sofa in particular, and we had some success with using double sided sticky tape in the favoured area. You can get special tape specially designed to discourage scratching, put I was put off by the reviews that said it damaged furniture so I just used normal double sided tape.