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."

Comments

Double-sided tape

[MacBrave]

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...........

Re:Nail biting

[Strange Ranger]

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!