Our cat Dosa got an early Christmas present this year: a cat mansion.

Ellen ordered this grand feline house from Taobao (China’s eBay) for 300 RMB (< $50), and it only took about 20 minutes to assemble. The 'mansion' is carpeted and has a few elevated platforms with a couple of toy mice dangling on strings. It stands about 185 cm tall, and because it's not very wide, it doesn't take up a lot of space in the apartment.

Almost immediately, the cat went nuts over it, and now it's the only thing she bothers scratching. She plays in it, sleeps in it, and just hangs out. She also loves being at the highest point in the apartment and being able to look down on everything.

In our old apartment, Dosa was rotten. She scratched up everything in her path, and what she couldn't scratch she would knock over. Her favorite time to do this also happened to be at 3 AM or so.

The furniture (while crummy to begin with) was scratched up quite a bit. Luckily, the landlord didn't care, but at the new place we were determined to make sure this didn't happen again. Getting her de-clawed was out of the question, so before the mansion we tried a few things:

What didn’t work

- Yelling or making loud noises: This worked temporarily. She got scared and ran away, and seemed to know what she was doing was wrong. Unfortunately, being a cat, she just didn’t really care. She just became more careful and caused trouble when we weren’t around.

- Cat nails: These look ridiculous, but do tend to work pretty well. Unfortunately, the cat absolutely hates the process of attaching them. Also, they only last a few days or so before they fall off, so going this route means you’ll be doing this every week or so. Apparently vets say they are harmless, but I still don’t really like the idea of them. While nowhere near as cruel as de-clawing, the cat’s main defense mechanism and means of grappling itself on to things no longer work as expected. Something tells me it must be a bit messed up for the cat.

What did work

- Lockdown: Since we moved into the new place, whenever we are not around to monitor her, Dosa is banned to the kitchen and laundry room where she cannot destroy anything other than her litter box and food bowl. This has worked really well, and seems to have calmed her down quite a bit.

- Spray bottle: These make a great deterrent, and seem to teach the cat pretty quickly where in the house is off limits. When she jumps on a table or starts attacking wires, a splash of water in the face scares the shit out of her, and makes her remember not to do it again. Now, whenever she sees the bottle, she runs. So while a little traumatizing, it’s painless to the cat, and you get the desired change in behavior.

The cat mansion seems to be the deciding tool in the transition period from ferocious beast to domesticated member of the household. The mansion makes her behave but still provides an outlet for her killer instincts. The way things are going, I’m pretty sure in a couple of weeks we won’t even need lockdown or the spray bottle to keep her in line.

As a side note, acording to Google Analytics, for some reason one of the most often used key words that gets people to chungkingmansions.com is ‘cat mansions’. So while I never planned it, hopefully now all of you cat mansion aficionados out there won’t leave here feeling completely ripped off.