Enlarge / Ariel and Caliban learned as kittens that scratching posts were fair game for their natural claw-sharpening instincts.Sean Carroll
Ah, cats. We love our furry feline overlords despite the occasional hairball and their propensity to scratch the furniture to sharpen their claws. The latter is perfectly natural kitty behavior, but overly aggressive scratching is usually perceived as a behavioral problem. Veterinarians frown on taking extreme measures like declawing or even euthanizing such “problematic” cats. But there are alternative science-backed strategies for reducing or redirecting the scratching the behavior, according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal
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