For those of us who want something soft and squooshy to love, but aren’t quite insane enough to produce an actual baby (and if you have both… how are you doing that?!), then getting a pet is inevitable. And if you fell on the cat side of that coin, there are plenty of pros and cons versus a dog, or something more outlandish, like a tarantula.
You don’t need to get up at the crack of dawn and brave any weather to take a cat out for its business. Of course, if you give them free rein to your bedroom, you might get danced all over at 4am. You won’t, hopefully, find your shoes destroyed or craters in your expensive sofa, but everything you own will be covered in enough hair to knit your own winter wardrobe. You’ll certainly have far less mud in the house, but kitty cats do come with another drawback – they love to scratch. And unless you want said scratching to happen on precious furniture, you’ll need to find the space for special toys to help them alleviate said craving.
Cat towers are of course a popular choice, but on average, they have a pretty large footprint. Unless you have a spacious property, it can be tough to find the square footage to fit in such a jungle gym for your felines. A much smaller alternative comes in the form of cat scratch pads. They’re light, small and you can just pop them on the floor, lean them up against something, or use simple adhesive tape to attach them to a door or even onto a piece of furniture that might otherwise be at risk of scratching! Cats absolutely adore these simple devices to sharpen their claws, but alas, your cat’s joy comes at a price.
The vast majority of these scratch pads are made out of ordinary textured cardboard. This means that every time your cat uses it, brown papery shrapnel get scattered all over the floor. They attach to your feet as you walk around and eventually spread around faster than car insurance ads. Thankfully, we can take inspiration from those baby-havers we mentioned earlier, as the child-rearing industry has already come up with an elegant solution to this problem. Behold – the tuff tray.
As we all know, babies and toddlers make a hideous mess and have a tendency to lose things. That or the parent winds up losing nerve endings in their feet, courtesy of strewn toys all over the floor. The tuff tray is literally a flat trough, of sorts, that you can pop on the floor and it massively helps contain the mess within. Get yourself one of these bad boys and pop your new catch scratchpad or pads inside. It’ll keep the vast majority of the cardboard shavings inside, so once it’s full, you can simply tip the carnage into a bin bag – plus, it’s cardboard, so it can go in the recycling. Any strays can be easily hoovered up.
Sure, they may not be the most stylish home accessory, but when you have company because they’re so flat, you can easily hide them under your bed or behind a closet. Other than that, they are an absolute god-send.
AMZNOVA is a great brand for this, you can order on Amazon and they even throw in a bit of catnip with every purchase, so you can mellow your putty tats out when they’re getting overly rambunctious – and be sure to have the camera ready – nothing funnier than a stoned kitty! Feel free to sprinkle the catnip in the tuff tray as well, since cats are big fans of rolling around in it.
And you never know, if your pet serves as sufficient “practice”, perhaps that tuff tray will come in handy when you upgrade from pet to child!
