Recently it has become an epidemic with cat shit all over the front garden.

Killing the hairy little ****er isn’t an option.

Thoughts? Don’t want to cover the garden in spikes and strings. Don’t want a dog or a cat of my own.

I had this issue at my last house where the little bawbags used to shit under where I hung clothes out to dry. More than once in my rush to hang stuff out to dry before going to work I’d trail cat shit all into my house.

You get many cat owners stating that cats are clean animals and bury their shit. This has proven incorrect as I could watch the wee bastards dropping their load before I could get out to chase them away.

I tried in no particular order;

Coffee Grounds in flower beds (Didn’t work)
Planting Curry plant at entry / egress points (Didn’t seem to work)
Planting Lavender plant (Again no benefit although smelt lovely)
Laying out orange peel (Didn’t work)
Ultra Sonic pest repellent (Moderate benefit)
Borrowing a dog (Quite effective)
Moving house (very effective)
Getting a dog (Most effective)

If I had a outdoor water tap I would of installed / tried one of those motion detector operated sprinkler systems.

I was one shit-on-the-carpet incident away from building a bloody trebuchet to launch the bawbags into the North Sea.

I had this for a while when a (presumably) wild colony moved in. Must’ve seen a dozen different cats over the course of a couple of months and my yard was poomageddon. With the caveat that correlation does not equal causation and all that, what worked for me was marking my own territory. A couple on stealth midnight slashes across the yard and they all buggered off somewhere else.

In a similar vein, a mate had a problem with neighbouring cats and tried all sorts, his solution was buying some lion poo off the Internet.

In any case, cats will revisit their toilets. It’s important to shift their offerings and clean up / disinfect the area, if it smells like a kitty latrine it’ll be used as one.

This has been done before on this forum, have a search.

These worked* for me https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004SGC75S/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_ZmQ3CbCK7Q1ZM

*no cat poo anywhere near them, just in other places in my garden instead

My mum used to put half-filled bottles of water on the lawn to stop cats crapping on the grass. I was most pleased that a cat crapped on one of the bottles 🙂

his solution was buying some lion poo off the Internet.

I can sort you out with some genuine panther shit.

No questions asked.

Shoot it?

Edit: oops just re-read your post.

Shoot it with a bb gun?

Whatever you do, don’t kill your neighbours cat and have it stuffed and mounted on a nice piece of hardwood with a little engraved brass plaque as an example to others.

That would be a catastrophe.

The neighbour would be catatonic with rage

I see it’s the front garden, so this might not be the best idea, but it will be hilarious when it catches the postman…

https://www.amazon.co.uk/PawHut-Spray-Sprinkler-Activated-Scarecrow-Adjustable/dp/B07HN3585F/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jHYV6nJksw

I had this problem. Solved it by moving house.

I’m 100% certain it’s not the same cat crapping in my new garden.

Just shoot the bloody thing and have done with it.

water pistol, you can soon train it to avoid your lawn / flower bed etc.

I had a similar problem thanks to a mad cat lady with 7 cats who lived nearby, the most effective deterrent was “toby” (jack russell), he disposed of one of the cats and is more than happy to dispose of the rest if they ever come into the garden again.

If you don’t want a dog then perhaps a motion activated water spray?

once retired, my dad seemingly made it his job to sit in the garden with a supersoaker with a strong fairy liquid mixture

Our neighbour suggested p*** in a supersoaker.. not a clue if that works.
Just make sure the kids don’t borrow it..

I’ve heard say the best solution is chilli flakes. Buy a kilo, spread around where they go, wait a day.

Because they’re tidy animals, they lick paws etc where chilli has rubbed.

They’ll also go to the same spot all the time, so you need to get rid of the smell there. Diluted vinegar/ammonia will get rid of the scent. Tidying it up all the time will help – removes the scent.

Obviously none are ‘permanent’ but it should cut it down

Get your own cat.

poor human wee around the edges of your garden ( or just where they go ) . Scares them and foxes off. I had a wee one dark night in my back garden where they shat and the foxes/cat poo stopped and they have never been back to crap.

Used to have the same issue

Next door had a thing for taking in strays, she had 6 of them. All used our garden even though we lived in the middle of the countryside and were surrounded by fields.

We tried everything, water pistols, ultra sonic boxes, lion wee, our own wee, borrowed a dog, even paved the entire garden (it was only small).

We moved…..

Lots of tennis balls. Every time you see a cat in the garden scare the **** life out of it. We don’t have a cat problem anymore. The elder cats seem to have taught the younger ones that our garden is a bad place.

I got one of these https://www.amazon.co.uk/STV-International-STV632-Mega-Sonic-Scatter-Cat/dp/B000NZPK5W
so so reviews on Amazon and it has drawbacks.
You need to be there and see the cat.
You need to get it more than once to deter from coming back.
It apparently doesn’t always work

BUT when I used it, I just saw the cat in the garden and “shot” it. My garden is on a slightly lower level than my neighbour’s. Cat got such a fright it tried to jump into neighbour’s garden, missed the landing, banged it’s head, fell back into the garden, tried to jump another wall, bounced off the compost bin before not quite getting to the top of the wall the going over head first. Was totally hilarious. Next time, it just ran and didn’t come back

We never had any crap in the back garden, just the front lawn so we got 2 ultrasonic thingies from Amazon & no crap since. That was about 6 months ago. (there’s about 5 cats in the street)

Pepper. Just basic ground black pepper where they are crapping. Works for dogs too – we had a problem because our house is on a private road and prime off the lead dog walking territory. Liberal application of pepper to front lawn and problem stopped

Just remember that the ultrasonic deterrents are possibly one of the most annoying things ever invented. Ballcocks are they ‘out of the human hearing range’.

They are like having a swarm of soprano mosquitoes stuck in your brain and can be heard from a  good few gardens away, too

Back in the early 70s, when I was very young, a bloke in our street found a novel way of dealing with a similar issue. He used to lie in wait on the hall floor, with an air rifle loaded with salt pellets poking through the low-level letterbox.
Any offending predator that wandered into his garden to unload a batch only needed to experience a high velocity salty balloon knot the once before deciding to seek alternative defecation arrangements.

The RSPB sell a sonic repeller thing that actually seems to work, though it’s relatively expensive. Runs off 9v batteries – last several months, buy in bulk on eBay – or can be powered off the mains if you have a handy outlet / window / hamster-powered turbine.

We tried cheaper, solar-powered ones and they are useless in the UK. I can’t hear a thing beyond the initial click when the thing gets triggered by movement. You might need a couple depending on how big / what shape your garden is, but the RSPB one does seem to work as advertised.

I’ve also used a Super Soaker on the neighbour’s cat with the result that it now runs off if I open the back door. To be fair to the evil little killing machine, it did bring us a dead rat as a peace-offering. I recommend the Super Soaker route if you simply want the cat to fear you.

We used an ultrasonic thing. Wasn’t an expensive one, about £15 I think. It didn’t work right away, but once I’d got the position correct, it probably then took a couple of weeks and it stopped the problem all together. It’s still sat out there now and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually work anymore, but the cat’s don’t come back.

Fill n fix foam.

“Fill n fix foam.”

As in fill the offending cat with expanding foam? That would stop any further defecation right enough

Just remember that the ultrasonic deterrents are possibly one of the most annoying things ever invented. Ballcocks are they ‘out of the human hearing range’.

cdoc out for a stroll earlier today 😉

These Wilko granules (ingerdients say garlic and clay) seem to reduce the amount of cat poo in my newly dug veg beds (the cats don’t like the beds that I’ve ignored all winter or the ones with caulifowers in).

https://www.wilko.com/en-uk/wilko-cat-dog-repellent-granules-500g/p/0330910

You do have to reapply after a few days. Cheap enough to be worth a try. Good luck …

This is an ongoing problem in my garden, there are at least five cats from around the neighbourhood that come into my garden, mainly because of all the birds that I encourage with feeders hanging in my Acer tree. It’s very difficult to nail the furry shitbags with a supersoaker, because the tree and two sheds divide the garden in half, with a patio immediately behind the house, and the small lawn and a patch of garden the other side. The tree is getting on for ten feet high, and almost as wide, so shooting anything through it isn’t possible. They have crapped on the grass, and on the garden area, breaking off freshly planted Fritillaries, which I was very annoyed about.
One cat killed a pigeon last year, and almost killed one of last year’s young blackbirds as well.
They’ve also been swiping the food I put out for the hedgehogs, which I put under a large paving slab on bricks, but I’ve changed that to three plastic boxes with a small hole in the end of each, arranged so cats can’t get into them.
One way I’ve found of scaring them is lobbing those little fun cracker things out of the landing window onto the patio, but it’s only temporary.
I might try the pepper, maybe with hot chilli powder mixed in, to see if that works, but at least one of the cats comes from the flats the other side of my fence, the owner leaves the top window open for it to go in and out, so it uses my garden to shit in. 🤬

Something* has been doing a loose poo on my lawn! I sought counsel with Neighbour Doreen the Wise. She recommended Jeyes fluid – a splurge in a 7 litre watering can and then dribbled over access and affected areas. So far , 3 days no poo & it hasn’t killed the lawn.
*It may be a fox.

I tried the sonic deterrents, they worked for about a week.

I have gripper rod painted with wood stain on top of my fence, again lasted about a week.

My issue isn’t so much with the poo but they like to walk through our plant bed and then climb the fence and then jump over on to our car which is parked behind.

Put temporary block paving down in the worst affected area yesterday morning. Came back from lunch to find a turd on it. Shovelled it up and threw it into the neighbour’s* garden. I’ve had enough.

*It is their cat BTW.

**They are probably wondering how a cat has crapped down the side of their greenhouse.

poor human wee around the edges of your garden

For real? Cats are driven off by the urine of economically disadvantaged humans? they can actually smell poverty?
Just how poor do the donors need to be? Are we talking Single car household/non-home owners or full on homeless?

Just beware OP the authorities might take an interest if you go out trying to persuade Tramps to sell you their wee.

For real? Cats are driven off by the urine of economically disadvantaged humans? they can actually smell poverty?

I believe the Jeremy Kyle show caused tellys to emit a certain frequency of radiation affecting human wee in ways only detectable to cats, staffies and people who work in Sports Direct

Put temporary block paving down in the worst affected area yesterday morning. Came back from lunch to find a turd on it. Shovelled it up and threw it into the neighbour’s* garden.

Would work better to deliver the shit still on the block through the window wouldn’t it.