I grew up in a bushy suburb with lovely wildlife, native birds, the whole bit. In our house and even some of our wider family, we believed that cats were to be kept indoors, if at all. We saw the results of outdoor, roaming cats and their senseless hunting sprees all too often. It was mostly birds that were the victims, but the baby ringtail possum was the kicker for me. It had no fur left around its tiny, bloodied torso. The WIRES lady was kind and sensitive while talking with us kids, but made it clear that she would be surprised if it survived. She called us a few days later to let us know that it had died. We were a practical family, not being too overly traumatised by deaths of pets, and we all knew where our meat came from, even from an early age, but to see a little creature shredded like that by an animal that had no intention of eating its prey was a difficult thing to get over. Especially when you consider that the animal in question had a full bowl of food sitting somewhere waiting to be eaten.

When my husband and I got our cat, Merlin, he was brought indoors and has not been allowed out to roam for the last 8 years he’s been in our care. He is sometimes let out in our fenced yard while we actively supervise him, and he gets a bit of grass to munch on every now and then, but other than that, he is strictly an indoor cat. He uses a litter box and causes chaos inside our house on an almost daily basis, but he does NOT have a cat door and he does NOT roam the neighbourhood.

A couple of years ago, my lovely husband bought me a couple of raised garden beds so that I could start a new veggie patch. He put them together and hauled a good half-ton of soil into them so that I could give the whole grow-your-own-food thing a decent shot.

When people want to start a suburban vegetable patch, it is generally for some reason other than purely food acquisition. For us, the idea of having an outside activity that would provide a tangible reward for labour and increase the value of our property was appealing. Added to that was the fact that you could then have organic produce, fresh picked from pasture to plate.

It only took a couple of nights for us to realise that our beautiful new veggie patch wasn’t actually serving the purpose for which it was designed. It had been turned into a public toilet for all the filthy felines that wandered freely about our neighbourhood.

This was when the battle lines were drawn. From then to this very day, I have been working my campaign to end all cat pooping on my property, Operation Cat Poop Prevention.

If you want to grow chemical-free vegetables you have to find a non-chemical method of repelling pests. Operation CPP started with the old fashioned method of what can only really be described as Punjabi sticks. I stuck a whole bunch of broken, sharpish sticks in the garden around the plants, in the deluded hope that these loaded felines wouldn’t like having to walk through the gauntlet before dropping their bombs amongst my plants. The next day there were more little packages for us to find.

A few days later I was whingeing about our poopy little problem to my family when my very sensible, country-bred brother in law started mumbling something that went a bit like: “Ahermmummhhmm… crushed up… in a saucer of milk… in the BACK YARD…” I told him I’d feel too guilty killing them off… although I must admit, I have gone through stages lately when it’s been a tempting thought.

It was around this time that the cat next door had a litter of kittens. Our worthy neighbours kept one of the litter, and we noticed that their laundry window, which overlooked our vegetable garden was often left open, and the cat and her kitten was jumping from the window to our fence, and then down into our yard. We now had 2 cats to deal with.

We soon realized that not only was the vegetable garden being used for a pit stop, but the border gardens which we’d prepared to grow a hedge in was also serving their lavatory purposes.

The next planting season I had a chilli plant which had a bumper crop just as we went away for a week or so. The chillies were left too long on the plant and were going to be thrown out by the time we got home. I donned a pair of disposable gloves and harvested those bad boys, mushing them up even more than they already were, and dropping them all throughout the gardens, seeds and all. The next day, there were more little cat-gifts for us to find.

Then we noticed that there was not just one cat and her now fully grown kitten hanging around our house, but another cat from different house was also skulking around at sunset. 3 cats worth of poop for me to clean… yay. They’d also started fighting at night time, and waking us up at 3 am with their awful screeching and yowling.

I caved on the whole “Organic is best” mantra and headed to my local Bunnings. They had a couple of different cat and dog repellant sprays so I enny-meeny-miney-moed one to the counter and took it home. After unloading half a bottle of this spray around my vegetable patch, making sure to not get the actual plants with the overspray, I went inside that night to sleep in the peaceful knowledge that I wouldn’t be confronted with any bog piles in the garden the next day… Oh how wrong I was.

The next step in my campaign was to call our local council. The customer service lady was very polite, and even more unhelpful. There is no current council policy on keeping cats off private property – in fact, quite the opposite. While dogs are not allowed to roam or enter someone else’s private property, cats are not restricted at all. There is not even a curfew in my local area to make owners keep their cats indoors at nighttime. They can walk, fight, reproduce, urinate, poop and throw-up on my private property as much as they jolly well please, and I told the council customer service lady that they certainly made good use of this legal permission. She suggested talking to my next door neighbour, but I told her that as she is the kind of woman who will stand, drunk, in the street at 2am, screaming at the neighbours that they can get “bleeped” for calling the cops on her VERY LOUD party (and as we had been the ones to call the police to said party, after hearing a brawl breaking out amidst yells of “I’ll Kill Ya”), I didn’t really feel inclined to go and seek her out.

I spent some time with my grandparents, who are avid gardeners themselves, and who in the past, have (ahem) “dealt with” Feral cats in their bushland community. They suggested that a chemical-free, non-deadly way of dealing with my problem would be to lay chicken wire down on top of the garden bed and plant my veggies through the wire, letting them grow through, and then ripping it all up at the end of that season. I spent a couple of months, blithely watching my veggies grow with no fears of being infected by cat-faeces transmitted toxoplasmosis. However, my husband and I soon realized that this was because he had top dressed our front lawn, which we hadn’t really been keeping an eye on as it was winter, and they were now using that nice, sandy spot as their new dunny space.

So, off to Bunnings we went again. This time we got the hard-core, “do not use this product around food-bearing plants” kinda gel pellet thingys. We fertilized the lawn with the evil-looking green gel pellets and went inside for the night, hoping for a good result. Lo and behold, the next day our hedge garden was newly dug up and extra “Nutrients” added, but the lawn was clear. Unfortunately whenever it rained and the pellets were washed away there would be another fresh shipment of cat turds left on our lawn.

My husband, poor man, had by this time been driven insane. He mowed the lawn one day and rather than get splattered with faeces, he cleared the poops up beforehand. Now I’m not defending his next actions at this point, but I can completely understand the feeling that caused this monumental lapse in judgement. Rather than dumping the poop in our garbage bin, he chucked them onto Screaming Lady Neighbour’s (Read here “cat owner”) side path, which ran next to our bit of lawn their cats were using as a toilet… Thus leaving us with no leg to stand on if we ever did get up the courage to actually talk to them about it. I saw Screaming Lady’s Husband pouring buckets of hot, soapy water out their window and down their path the next weekend.

By this time in the game I’d been VERY LOUDLY complaining about the cat poop in my garden every time I went outside. I realised I had to lay off the complaining when our Little Person jumped out of the car after we got home from grocery shopping one day and pointed accusingly in the direction of our front lawn. “YOU!!! EEEEVIL CAT!!!” Little Person screeched. I spun around in time to see Screaming Lady’s cat race away from her comfy spot on our lawn. I quickly ushered LP inside and explained that we probably shouldn’t yell that at the cats… Hypocritical coward that I am.

My husband kept having to clear poop off the newly established lawn every time he mowed, so we decided to take the next step in cat repellant. We were at the end of the growing season so I ripped out my old veggie plants and took out some of the chicken wire. The cats had had enough time to get used to the veggie garden being off limits, I stupidly figured, so we laid the chicken wire down on the lawn and pegged it down. Then scattered more gel pellets over it.

I also planted out a frangipane in the lawn’s adjoining garden that day, filled the rest of the dirt space with gravel, and planted a couple of fat, juicy, SPIKY cacti amongst it for good measure.

The next day was when we realized that we weren’t dealing with normal, run of the mill obnoxious animals. These THINGS were so psychotically deranged and unstable that they’d pooped in the gravel, around the cacti, and on the chicken wire on the lawn, with the gel pellets all around as well. There was something intrinsically wrong with these cats.

I called the council again. Surely they’d be grateful to be informed that some strange, dangerously psychotic feline THINGS were roaming the streets and had to be stopped?! But no… I’m pretty sure I got the same polite, unhelpful lady as last time… the only difference was that with this call she asked if we’d thought about getting a dog, because apparently that was how SHE had stopped her lawn getting pooped in by cats. I had to take 3 calming breaths and count to 10 before I could gently scream at her that I was trying to AVOID HAVING SOMETHING POOP ALL OVER MY YARD!!!!

Back to Bunnings. This time with my husband. We got some star pickets and a big roll of dog wire. We now have a 4 ft fence around my veggie garden. It looked like it was working and then I noticed the new dig-holes and poops around my beans. Obviously dog wire isn’t narrow enough to stop cats getting through.

After visiting my grandparents again I came home with the suggestion of using some questionably legal chemical to (Ahem) “deal with” the cats (which I politely declined and conscientiously forgot the name of) and a plan to head back to Bunnings for some mouse traps. I set those little mouse traps all through my veggie garden, sans bait of course, and waited… and waited. Nothing. A few days later I headed out to check my precious beans and found my traps had been buried in the dirt, still rigged to blow, right next to a steaming pile. I had to use a stick to disarm them before I could get them out of the garden without snapping my own fingers.

Then one day I was clearing out my pantry and I found some ground coffee that was about 6 years out of date. One of our friends kindly informed us that coffee is actually out of date about 6 seconds after grinding, so we didn’t feel sinfully wasteful for scattering it around the newly planted beans… Of course, now we have some hyped up cats (and beans) because that also did jack-all in the poo prevention campaign.

A few days later I headed out to the backyard with a giant roll of twine. I sat in my garden and criss-crossed a matrix at the level of the top of my garden edge, and it seemed to work. They obviously didn’t want to be getting their little paws caught up in twine while digging a toilet hole. The only thing is it took about an hour to do the whole garden, and then I had to pull it all out to get my plants out at the end of season.

Now, I hadn’t seen any poops in my veggie garden for a few months, which was encouraging, especially as I hadn’t been doing anything specific to prevent them at this stage. However, last weekend when we were tending our front garden and planting a new little Protea in there, we found their latest poop-hole. I got the dubious honour of pooper-scooping out our front garden, while my husband did the weeding. I’m too scared to do any prevention in the front garden as they might just decide that the back garden is worth another try… But my next plan will be to place the dog wire down horizontally, at the same level my string matrix was, and hope that cats don’t like sitting on wire while they poop… I was also thinking a package for my local council member might not go astray. It will contain a sealed box of the current poops in my yard. With a letter attached, explaining how I am unsatisfied with the council policy on roaming cats, and that I don’t think my council rates-paid garbage bin should have to be used to dispose of other people’s pets’ faeces, and could they please arrange for some other disposal method. Either of the poops or the cats, I really don’t have a preference either way!