Add another item to list of useless damncat
control purchases

The latest on a long list of mostly useless purchases we have made to accommodate the damncats in our lives is a ScatMat, designed to deliver a mild, static-electricity-like shock when contact is made.
I’ve longed for a toned-down version of a cattle prod where I could reach out and touch one of the creatures with a mild electric thrill. I tried one of those mosquito zappers that looks like a cross between a fly swatter and a tennis racket but with batteries in the grip. If you sweep across the path of a flying insect, the creature is fatally and very satisfyingly zapped.
But the mosquito zapper doesn’t work well with damncats. Somehow, they are very hard to ground, so my zapper is sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting for somebody to tell me how to convert it to a damncat prod.
The only success I’ve had connecting electrical current and damncats came from a miniature version of an electric fence that a lady down the street once gave me. With far more effort than it was ever worth, I rigged it in front of a door where one of the damncats of that day would scratch to let be known her desire for it to be opened. Whatever sensation she felt was enough to keep her away from the door for a time, but my wife soon got tired of stepping around wires and besides, she doesn’t appreciate under any circumstances delivering even mild electric thrills to damncats nor having them delivered to herself.
So the ScatMat arrived. I checked it out, felt and heard its sharp snap when I made contact with my hand.
I placed it midway on the stairs where I thought it might discourage Oscar the Damncat from going upstairs  where he had no business.
“That thing really worked on Oscar,” my wife told me in a tone of condescending sarcasm after she descended those stairs some time later. “He’s sleeping on it.”