The Perimeter is Once Again Secure
Recap: In short, we love our kitties and want to take good care of them. We have lost too many family members (Misha, Pepin, and Jihi) simply from having them wander off. Then, we found the Affordable Cat Fence. We enclosed the yard at the house in Whittier, and it worked great — we were able to leave the cats outside unattended, with no worries.
When we moved to Yucaipa, the neighbors who live behind us were none too keen about us attaching metal rods to their fence, nor did they want to see any netting extending above the fence. Eventually we found some U-posts at Home Depot and some comparable netting at Lowes, and put up an interior perimeter, about 4 feet high:
This worked for a while. But eventually, my two adventurous boys (Gabriel and Charlie) figured out that they could climb over it at the posts (kitties don't like to climb something that they don't think will support their weight). This meant that we were back to letting them out only while supervised, or else have to track them down if they got out. (Gabriel, by the way, is amazingly obedient for a cat. If I see him on the fence or outside the perimeter and call him to come back, he always comes to my call!)
Anyway, the Saturday before last we finally put up the cat fence extensions. These steel rods angle inward, creating an overhang that the cat won't climb. Gilbert took the time to drill holes in the 19 stanchions needed so that he could attach them to the U-posts. He got them all installed, bolting them on in 2 places, and we put up part of the netting. (Incidentally, I noticed that the netting from Affordable Cat Fence was a lot more lightweight than what we found at Lowe's. This may explain why the cats were better able to climb the heavier netting. Also, visually, the lighter netting is much more unobtrusive.) Then of course it was cold and rainy all last week. But today I got the rest of the netting up, and we now have full cat containment in the back yard. Yay!
