Has this cat hater gone too far with his DIY automatic anti-cat device?

NEWS AND COMMENT – PERTH: A peeved and frankly angry Australian man, Craig Turner, built a device which sprays a lot of water at a cat who enters his property and which is fired off by a motion detector. It’s also linked to a camera so the whole thing is filmed for his successful YouTube channel, on which there is more than one video about how to deter domestic and stray cats.

It appears that the Daily Mail have bought his latest anti-cat video which is why I’m presenting it on this page, and why I can’t see it on his channel. Turner appears to be a bit of a mechanical whiz and he likes creating fancy devices including one which helps to keep cats out of a backyard. He’s got another system which you can see in the video below at the base of the page.

Of course, domestic cats sprayed with water like this, or ‘attacked’ by some other device, are going to respond in a shocked way. That’s the whole point of these devices. It is to motivate a cat to stay away and to consider the area as out of bounds and dangerous. But to revel in it by making videos is crude and insensitive.

Please note that sometimes videos such as the one above stop working over a period of time for reasons beyond my control and if this has happened I apologise.

Turner said that in 2011 he had cats bothering him on his roof. They were keeping him awake at night, he said to Daily Mail Australia. He claims that the cats were constantly marking territory by urinating, one cat over-marking the other’s urine causing a constant problem. He was working at home and having meetings while apologising for the smell of cat pee outside wafting into his home. He noticed one cat urinating on his car and he claims that the liquid leaked through the passenger window onto the seat.

Further, in 2018 he had a bird and her chicks nesting close to the ground in his backyard. He wanted to protect them so he created the cat sprayer deterrent. The birds are a native species called New Holland Honeyeaters. We know how concerned true blood Australians are about their native species. They consider the feral and domestic cat to be decimating these animals so they find any possible way to deter them or kill them (they try to avoid killing domestic cats but they kill feral cats). Of course, they conveniently forget about human behaviour and how that dramatically harms wildlife conservation to a far greater extent.

He says that his DIY cat deterrent device costs just AU$20 in parts, such as a 12 volt infrared motion detecting module which cost him $3 online. He’s made six videos of his anti-cat devices in action, accruing more than 8.4 million views. Regrettably, he has received death threats from angry cat lovers. I don’t agree with death threats but everybody has a right to voice their opinion.

I do agree that his devices are too harsh. You don’t need to scare cats to death like this. You can accept them although I can see his point of view and there are occasions when cats should be kept inside or inside a backyard cat confinement fence. As mentioned I don’t like his joy at scaring cats. He finds the whole thing funny. Not good.

The Daily Mail irresponsibly, in my opinion, recite the usual statistics about domestic and feral cats preying on native Australian wildlife. These figures are not necessarily reliable and should not be quoted without a notice explaining the source of the figures.