Your Indoor Cat Is Safe. Is She Bored?

An indoor cat is a safe cat, and very often a bored one. Boredom in cats does not look like sighing at the window. It looks like ankle ambushes, laps of the hallway at three in the morning, a bald patch licked onto a thigh, eating out of emptiness and gaining weight, or a cat who sleeps twenty hours a day because nothing else is on offer. The answer is not more toys in a basket. It is giving the part of her brain that was built to hunt something to do.

Start with the daily hunt. Two sessions a day, 10 to 15 minutes each, with a wand toy — not your hand. Move the toy like prey: away from the cat, around a corner, under the edge of a rug, freeze, then dart. Prey never runs at the predator. Let her catch it every fourth or fifth pounce, because a hunt with no captures is frustrating rather than fun. Wind the session down with slower, tired prey, let her make one final catch, and then feed her a meal.

That order matters. Hunt, catch, eat, groom, sleep is a single sequence in a cat's head, and ending play with food completes it. A completed sequence is what makes a cat settle instead of pestering you. Doing the second session last thing at night is the single most effective change for the three-in-the-morning problem.

Now get rid of the food bowl. A free-living cat makes roughly ten hunting attempts a day for about ten small meals. A bowl delivers all of that in ten seconds and leaves the rest of the day empty. Split the daily ration into four to six portions and serve them in puzzle feeders, a rolling ball dispenser, egg boxes, paper cups on a shelf, or simply scattered across a room. Start easy. A puzzle so hard that the cat walks away teaches her to walk away.

Build up, not out. A cat measures territory in volume, not floor space. Add shelves, a tall tree, the top of a wardrobe, and a route from floor to high perch and back down without touching the ground. Aim for at least one resting spot per cat above human head height. In a multi-cat home, vertical space is the cheapest way to lower tension there is.

A window perch with a bird feeder outside is free daytime television, and chattering at the birds is normal. But if she stares at a neighbourhood cat in the garden every day and then starts spraying indoors, block the low window: that view is stress, not enrichment.

Rotate the toys. Keep five or six out, box the rest, and swap once a week. A toy that has been gone a fortnight comes back new. Add a large cardboard box and a paper bag with the handles cut off. Around two thirds of cats respond to catnip; many of the rest respond to silvervine or valerian, so try a silvervine stick before you conclude yours is no fun.

Scratching is not negotiable. Give her a post tall enough for a full stretch, at least 80 cm (32 in), rock solid, in sisal or bare wood, and put it where she actually wants to scratch: beside her sleeping spot and near the doorway, not hidden in the laundry room.

And yes, you can train a cat. Five minutes with a clicker and a scrap of chicken buys a nose touch, a sit and a recall — and mental work tires a cat as thoroughly as a chase does.