Cat proofing a fence

Giving our cats safe access to the outdoors has not been an easy feat. It was considerably easier with our previous cat Mali. Given she was a senior cat when we got her, we figured she must be pretty street wise and got a cat flap installed so she had free access to the outside. As it turned out, she couldn't actually climb the fences due to her arthritis so she was safely contained to our garden. She escaped out the front door literally once, was quickly retrieved, and cottoned on immediately that the front garden was a no-no. I could have a food shop delivered with Mali contentedly watching from her bed and the delivery driver commenting on what a good cat that is. Literally the only thing we had to worry about was getting her in come night time, as otherwise she would patrol the garden and screech whenever she caught a neighbour cat getting too close to her territory, waking us up!

Foolishly I wasn't too concerned when we first got Mica and Opal, as they were initially terrified of the outdoors. This probably wasn't too surprising, given their first experiences in life were being dumped outside and transported to another country via van with multiple other cats and dogs. We couldn't even get parcels delivered without them running as far as they could in the opposite direction. I was hoping they'd be home bodies, but the older they got the more interested they got in the smell of outside when a door was open. 

Our first attempt at cat proofing was a DIY version of fence toppers in which an angled bracket attached to mesh is intended to keep your cats inside their own garden. J was very against the idea of paying £1000s for something that may not work and given the majority of our fence posts are concrete, they wouldn't be easy to drill through to attach a bracket. We therefore got hanging basket brackets which slide over the post and attached cat proof mesh to that.

I want to stress here that I think fence toppers are a fantastic idea and I would have loved my cats to have the full run of the garden. The reality is though that it isn't going to work for everyone and is dependent on how determined your cat is to escape and the layout of your garden. For us, the obvious downfall was that we didn't have the angle on the brackets or the necessary height. Its use was literally just blocking a cat that climbs up the fence as the mesh blocks them from above. When Opal and Mica were 6 months old and got their first taste of the garden they were entranced enough for a while not to push boundaries. But the weaknesses soon became impossible to ignore:

• Gaps in the mesh.

It sounds daft I know, but when you're doing it yourself and you have a garden full of problems it's actually hard to avoid this. Opal has always been a tiny cat and she would use her small size to squeeze through gaps we couldn't even see. We spent several weeks convinced she could teleport before we finally caught her in the act which involved spying on her from an upstairs window. Even if you're lucky enough to get it right first time, the mesh still needs to be checked regularly as cats can rip out the staples and adverse weather may damage it. Snow will put a strain on the mesh so needs to be removed.

• Sheds.

You need to cat proof your shed and any other garden buildings too or they'll just hop on that to escape the garden. We also had our bathroom roof to contend with. You'd be surprised how high your cat can jump! 

• Trees. 

We have three massive trees. We tried cat tree repellents which are a spiked belt that wraps around the top of the tree and is intended to stop cats getting to nesting birds. They have plastic nubs that cover the spikes but I think poor Mica still poked himself in the eye once. A persistent cat may try to get past it anyway, and if they can jump straight over it from another section of the garden it renders it pointless.

PVC roofing panels did work for us, but it's a bit of an ugly solution. Pop two PVC roofing panels together around the trunk of the tree. It needs to be high enough that they can't jump past it. We used a variety of weatherproof tapes to attach them together but it needed regular replacing, so I'd suggest using proper fixings for these panels. Cats can't get a grip on the sheet so I'd recommend this method.

• Garden furniture.

This is what I consider the biggest issue with fence toppers. If your cat can get on a piece of garden furniture (or indeed any item that gives them the height they need) they can potentially use that as a spring board to jump right over the mesh. Cat proofing companies recommend you place everything away from the fences if that is the case. If you have a narrow garden like I do, there is nowhere for that stuff to go, and unless you're willing to have an empty garden, it simply isn't an option. For a very long time I had an upside down garden bench as that was the easiest way for the cats to hop over the fence.

• Escapes through the ground.

The fence is not the only way to escape the garden. After leaving Opal and Mica unsupervised in our fancy new cat proofed garden, I found them both gone. They had dug their way out through the fence and were now in the neighbour's garden! Perhaps like me you thought only dogs did that. Your cat too may be a digger. I now have wooden stakes running along the bit of fence the cats still have access to.

• Monkey cats.

I think it's important to point out that even if you have the professionals in who are good at identifying potential issues, it's not going to work if you have a particularly agile cat. The angle of a cat proof bracket forces a cat to climb the mesh from underneath. Whilst cats wouldn't normally climb like that, and I'm sure the majority couldn't be bothered to put that much effort in, the reality is that a determined cat can and will climb that mesh like a monkey. Mica would launch himself from whatever part of the garden he currently considered the biggest weakness in our project, and climb up. I believe if you do have a failed professional job because of that, the solution is to electrify the fence. That's certainly not something I would be willing to do.

Having finally given up on cat proofing the garden, we spent a tedious period of time supervising the cats at least once a day, in all weathers, so they could get some outdoor time. Even two people were not enough to stop Mica escaping at that point so it was finally time for me to start convincing J that a catio is a good idea.