Like most of us with soft tops I suffer from cats sunning themselves on my roof in the summer and leaving a thick residue of hair behind them.
I know many people have tried all sorts of things to keep them off but with limited success.
Having read that cats hate the smell of pepper I wondered how I could impart that smell to my roof. Just sprinkling pepper on would work for a day or so but as soon as the car was moved it’d all fall off.
What I ended up doing was this.
I took a 25g pack of ground black pepper and mixed it with water in an empty sauce bottle and left it to steep for a week.
The resulting dark brown liquid was then filtered through a coffee filter and put into a squirty bottle.
I cleaned the roof thoroughly so there was no cat hair on it at all and applied a fine mist of the liquid to it.
Next day there was a small amount of hair on the roof but nowhere near as much as there was usually. It’s as if the cat got on, sat for a few minutes then decided it didn’t like it and got off again.
I cleaned that off, applied another fine mist and two weeks later I still have NO cat hair on my roof.
I reapply it after it rains and so far it’s working well.
If you’re worried about it making your car smell it doesn’t seem to. If I put my nose right next to the fabric I can detect a slight peppery smell but more than a couple of inches away I can’t smell it at all.
Cats are scared of cucumbers as they think it’s a snake - you could try leaving one on the roof in its plastic wrapping to see if it works as a deterrent. .
My cat eats snakes (and just about anything else that moves!), although I have told her that they are a protected species and she’s not, falls on deaf ears!. She even attacks my green and black garden hose thinking it’s a grass snake!
Tried it with mine, if it’s just lying there she gives it a wide berth, but if I drag it along on a piece of string she pounces on it. So I wonder if, when it’s just lying there, they think it’s a large “jobbie” from a very large critter that’s waiting to pounce on them! As any cat owner(?) will tell you, a cat’s behaviour is very logical, to another cat, not to their people!
Reminds me of the white pigeons we have all around our village and can be a right nuisance on bird feeders. Someone said they hate squirrels so put a plastic fake one by the feeder and it will scare them off…yea right that worked well
Pigeons! We’ve got a pesky Sparrowhawk that patrols our local gardens.
We also had a big fat Wood Pigeon sitting on a nest on my garden pergola until this morning…eggs were about to hatch but all that was there first thing today was a pile of feathers on the floor!
