Are citrus fruits a good cat deterrent?

Citrus fruits might be an effective cat deterrent for a small, contained area such as preventing your cat from using a large flower pot as a toilet. However, I don’t see citrus fruit peelings being an effective or practical deterrent for a backyard unless you want your whole backyard covered in citrus fruit peelings. That’s not going to look particularly nice, is it? The point is you have to use a lot to have any real deterrent effect over a large area. And if a cat is well motivated, their motivation will probably overcome their distaste for the smell of citrus fruit.

Are citrus fruit peelings an effective cat deterrent?
Are citrus fruit peelings an effective cat deterrent? Background image: Kseniia Konakova/Shutterstock. Montage: MikeB. Foreground image in public domain.
Two useful tags. Click either to see the articles: Toxic to cats | Dangers to cats

There are no scientific studies on the effectiveness of citrus fruit peelings as a wandering domestic cat deterrent who insists on going into someone else’s backyard. A lot is said about citrus fruit as a deterrent to domestic cats but most of it, if not all, is anecdotal, i.e., personal opinion without really good scientific or hard evidence.

I would have loved to use a scientific study as a basis for this article but, as mentioned, sadly not.

One cat owner used citrus fruit effectively when he adopted a stray cat who insisted on using a fairly big indoor pot plant about 3 feet tall by 2 feet across as their toilet. Clearly the stray cat had used outdoor facilities all her life and was unwilling to use a cat litter tray.

He scattered orange peel over the soil in the pot and freshened it up every few days (more work). His cat sniffed the peel and after that never used the flowerpot as a latrine again. That’s pretty good proof that it works in a specific area but no doubt he used a lot of orange peel in a pot with a 2-foot diameter. That is not the same as protecting a large backyard from a trespassing neighbour’s cat.

Smells that cats hate

Citrus fruits might work better for some cats than for others. It depends upon how much they dislike the smell and, conversely, how motivated they are to overcome it. One woman commenting on this topic said that if someone covered $10,000 in notes in skunk smell and it was the only deterrent to grabbing it, she should be perfectly happy to smell like skunk!

She was referring to motivation versus deterrent and which was the stronger force. Another person stated that they like citrus-smelling deodorising sprays and it doesn’t bother her cats. It might be the low concentration which makes it ineffective.

Another person says that she likes to eat Texas Star Ruby grapefruit. When she does this her cats do not stay away from her! That’s quite a nice little test which disproves the effectiveness of citrus fruit deterrence.

Is orange oil safe for cats?

There is not much more to say about this. If you want to deter cats from your backyard with citrus fruit peelings, you’re going to have to put a hell of a lot of them down which is going to make your backyard look ridiculous and almost unusable for humans as well as cats! I cannot recommend this method of deterring cats.

A better method is to use ultrasonic sound which is recommended by the RSPB in the UK and which has about a 50% success rate in absolute deterrence and they reduce the amount of time that a cat trespasses in a backyard if they insist on invading it. That’s been proven in a scientific study. However, some people can hear ultrasonic sound. For them the device is unusable.

Another pretty effective but probably less useful cat deterrent would be a motion sensor activated water spray. This would make the area out of bounds for humans too.

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