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Protecting Your Gear from Pets?
EvilJoven asks: "About a month ago I spent quite a large chunk of change on a new system only to have my cat chew through the VGA source cable of my brand new display. Over the course of the last few years my cat has cost me nearly $300CDN in repair and replacement costs due to chewed cables including a few power cables which are not only a pain to replace but potentially fatal to the animal and a fire hazard. So far the best solution I've found to stop this is wrapping all my cables in Snap-On Wire Protectors (about $6CDN for 3m at Canadian Tire in the Automotive section) but this is a rather unsightly solution. Due to the fact that I live in a one bedroom apartment restricting my cats access to my hardware is not an option. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on a better way to protect gear from animals."
Wrap you cables in double-sided tape? Cat hate the sticky feeling on their paws. It worked when our cats were getting in the habit of clawing our screen windows...........
Ironically enough, that's sort of how my wife got her cat. She found a little black kitten screaming her head outside off on Halloween and took her in. She asked around, and later that evening the neighbors got home and said "Oh yeah, she's ours. We found her foaming at the mouth this morning, so we threw her out. No, we don't really want her back; she tends to chew on power cords."
Per the vet, 1)kittens chew on power cords, and 2) when the get a jolt, they will drool and "foam."
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
My oldest dog, Emma, then a 1-yr-old puppy, pulled all of the phone cable out from under our house. All of it. She found the box and went to work. Now that's dedication.
We tried to keep Emma from jumping on our kitchen door by putting hot sauce (Texas Pete, Tabasco and a delightful Habanero sauce... in that order). That's how we found out that she likes hot sauce.
I was driving my truck into our back yard to drop something off. With Georgia summers and no A/C, keeping the windows open is a must. Emma adores the truck. She just likes to sit in the bed while it's parked if we let her. My passenger window was open about 10 inches. She's a 45 lb dog. She jumped through the window opening and into the cab while I was rolling at about 2 mph into the back yard. These don't count the antics of the other three dogs or any of my now dearly departed cats.
The moral of the story is that smart, determined or bored animals will do what they ain't supposed to do. We cured Emma's phone phreaking by getting her a dog. She was much happier with a playmate, and a lot of her energy went into playtime with brother Harry. It didn't cure everything, but having something to keep her interested made a huge difference.
Cats are a tougher trick. Some just want to chew on stuff. Others won't even eat people food. The issue isn't as easy as getting them a playmate. Our best cat training method was a water gun. We couldn't be home every minute, but the water training seemed to take root really quickly. The best cat I ever had eventually learned the word "no."
Pepper may be more effective with cats (white or plack powder... depending on your carpet color). Just sprinkle a little around the cables. A scratching post or cat playhouse may be useful, too (after all, you've already spent a lot of money).
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
Similarly, it won't keep many birds away from cords. My mother has a parrot and a cockatieu (sp?). For kicks, my brother and I would buy ever hotter peppers to see if the bird would ever stop eating them. No dice. When the peppers are eating through the gloves you handle them with (hyperbole, don't ask for a type:) we gave up. The little blighter would pop the cap, eat the seeds and ribs, then beg for more.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
testify my brother.
No, it's not. Cats are social creatures, just like dogs - just because they display their sociality in different manner than dogs, or that some cat owners decide to reward thier cat's dominant behaviour (which is misinterpreted as anti-social tendencies), doesn't mean that the social instincts are not there.
One of my firends, who should not have pets, has a cat. The cat started scratching his crappy sofa. I mention something about it, a month later he finally gets a scratching post. But since the cat has the sofa nicely broken in, he's not particularly interested in the curiously large lump of carpet. So my buddie is all pissed off I made him buy a scratching post for the cat, and the cat doesn't like it. Solution: Shove the scratching post up against the corner of the couch he likes to scratch one. Amazingly, or not, it immediately solved the problem. I also taught him to come when called (when I took care of him during a vacation), but since my pal never kept up with it, or even in fact calls him anything other than "Cat", he stopped doing it pretty quickly.
Again, being a dog person, I normally couldn't be bothered, but his cat is such a ham.
Actually I read somewhere that the whole pepper genus evolved specifically to disperse seeds through birds alone. A bird has a much shorter less-acidic digestive tract than a mammal. A bird also has no teeth. So the bird can disperse the seeds, whereas a mammal's teeth and digestive tract would destroy, or at least sterilize, the seeds. So as a plant, how do you get birds to eat your seeds and not mammals? Simple, you "evolve" a compound that mammals find totally unpalatable, but that birds don't mind at all. Hence capsaicin.
AFAIK all birds are totally immune to capsicum/capsaicin. They can chomp through a pile of habeneros and not notice anything even zesty.
So all of us hot pepper lovers can thank birds for the very existence of hot peppers!
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Funny that we got a cluster of comments about birds eating hot peppers. The ufl.edu article was interesting, but I noticed that they reported their test peppers being eaten mostly by a single species of bird.
It's not really known whether all birds find hot peppers tasty. It wouldn't be surprising if this were limited mostly to New World birds, since that's where peppers evolved. We have a conure who loves hot peppers, but conures are from South America, so that's not too useful as an example. However, we also have two cockatiels, and they also like hot peppers. They are Australian, and are somewhat of an outlier among parrots. So they are useful support for an "all birds are immune to capsaicin" hypothesis.
Actually, it's probably not true that they can't taste capsaicin. It's obvious that all of our parrots like hot peppers better than sweet peppers. So there's a good chance that they can taste the capsaicin, and they like the taste. Part of recent research has shown that capsaicin attacks the same mammal nerves that report heat, but this doesn't happen in birds. So it's calling them "hot" isn't just a metaphor; the capsaicin is literally triggering your heat sensors. It's likely that, for birds, capsaicin has a taste, although it doesn't produce a "hot" effect. At least some birds, especially parrots, seem to like whatever taste it has.
A bit of irony here is that hot peppers have recently been spread all over the planet, by a mammal. The peppers' nefarious scheme to scare off mammals was a dismal failure with us, to the peppers' benefit. We have three pots of small, hot peppers in the house. Most of the fruit end up as bird food, though we use a few of them ourselves in cooking. One of the pots is in full bloom right now.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I ran a pvc maze behind my desk, with the wires running through it to where it needs to go. the pvc can be painted with krylon fusion spraypaint. Works against ferrets, also. . . provided you get the diameter right.