This is a specific conversation about Cat scratching furniture — redirect it properly — ask about yours and get one honest answer for your exact situation.
inparticular.ai
Chair legs are a classic target — and if you're home all day, your Tonkinese has basically turned your office into their full-time scratching gym. Scratching is completely normal behaviour: they're conditioning their claws and leaving scent marks, not staging a protest against your furniture. The fix isn't stopping them — it's giving them something better right there in the same space. Chair legs are vertical and usually wood or hard plastic, so that tells us a lot about what to look for. Is your cat scratching mostly in one spot, or are they working their way around multiple chair legs? And is the chair fabric, leather, or a hard wooden frame?
It's a wooden frame office chair, and honestly she goes for the same two front legs every single time. She kind of wraps her front paws around them and pulls down.
inparticular.ai
That wrapping-and-pulling-down motion is really useful to know — she wants something she can grip with both paws and get real resistance from. That's a cat who needs a tall, sturdy vertical post with a rough texture, placed right next to those chair legs. What material does she seem to prefer — have you ever seen her scratch carpet, sisal rope, or cardboard?
She ignores the cardboard scratcher we got her. She did go for the doormat once which is kind of woven and rough.
inparticular.ai
Perfect — she wants rough, tightly woven texture she can really dig into, not the looser corrugated cardboard. That's a sisal cat. My recommendation is the SmartCat Ultimate Scratching Post. It's 32 inches tall, which is important — most cheap posts are too short for a full stretch, and Tonkinese are athletic cats who like to really extend. It's wrapped in woven sisal that gives exactly the resistance your cat is after. The base is heavy enough that it won't wobble when she grips it, which matters because a post that tips even once often gets abandoned. Put it within about 30cm of her favourite chair leg initially — you can gradually move it away once she's hooked on it.
Will she actually use it though? She's ignored scratching things before.
inparticular.ai
The cardboard failure was almost certainly about texture and height, not stubbornness. Tonkinese are smart and curious — they respond well when something actually satisfies what they're trying to do. The key with the SmartCat post is placement first: right next to the chair leg she already loves. You can also rub a tiny amount of dried valerian or silvervine on it on day one to get her attention — catnip works for some cats but not all, and Tonkinese often respond better to silvervine. Once she's scratching it regularly in that spot, shift it a foot every few days toward where you'd prefer it to live permanently.
That makes sense. Is there anything to protect the chair in the meantime?
inparticular.ai
Yes — double-sided sticky tape on the chair legs works well as a short-term deterrent while she's building the new habit. Cats hate the sticky feeling on their paws. Feliscratch by Feliway is another option — it's a pheromone liquid you apply to the new post to attract scratching there, and it comes in a format that also temporarily discourages them from the old spot. But honestly, with the right post in the right place, most cats make the switch within a week or two without needing much more than that.
