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Keeping your cats away from things

So recently I had issues with my cats (I have three) getting into items they're not supposed to. Fortunately, I know how to handle this.

When we first moved into our current house, we bought a tiny (real) Christmas tree. It was too small to put on the floor so we put it on a table.

Our cats thought that this was the best thing since sliced bread though and were constantly trying to rub up against it and eat the needles off of it. Since we were putting ornaments on the tree and it wasn't particularly steady to begin with, we decided we needed a good way to keep them away from it.

My wife found a post that said combining a small amount of orange essential oil (literally one to two drops) into a full spray bottle of water and spraying the area you didn't want the cats to be in might work so we tried it.

Apparently, cats are not fond of the smell of oranges so this is supposed to dissuade them from going near the item in question. You can also spray them directly with the mixture as it's highly diluted and non-toxic. This was so effective as a deterrant that all we needed to do after a while was motion toward the spray bottle and the cats started running. As the spray is more or less just orange scented water, even if you miss the only consequence is that whatever you hit will just smell like oranges.

Since then, we've used this technique to keep them away from areas or items that they shouldn't be getting into. We haven't even gone through the bottle we filled originally yet either so it's a fairly cheap way to solve this problem.

Now I just need to find where we stuck that spray bottle the last time we used it...

Update

Now that I've sprayed the items in question with the spray, the cats have gone from completely obsessed with them to pretending like they don't exist. Success!