Why Does a Cat Tear At The Fabric of
Your Favorite Chair

The usual answer is that the animal is sharpening its claws. This is true, but not in the way most people imagine. The envisage a sharpening up of blunted points in the manner of humans improving the condition of blunted knives. But what really occurs is the stripping off of the old, worn-out claw sheaths to reveal glistening new claws beneath. It is more like the shedding of a snake’s skin than the sharpening of a kitchen knife. Sometimes, when people run their hands over the place where the cat has been tearing at the furniture they find what they think is a ripped out claw and they then fear that their animal has accidentally caught its claw in some stubborn threads of the fabric and damaged its foot. But the “ripped-out” claw is nothing more than the old outer layer that was ready to be discarded.

Cats do not employ these powerful “stropping” actions with the hind feet. Instead they use their teeth to chew off the old outer casings from the hind claws.

A second important function of the stropping with the front feet is the exercising and strengthening of the retraction and protrusion apparatus of the claws, so vital in catching prey, fighting rivals, and climbing.

A third function, not suspected by most people, is that of scent-marking. There are scent glands on the underside of the cat’s front paws and these are rubbed vigorously against the fabric of the furniture being clawed. The rhythmic stropping, left paw ,right paw, squeezes scent onto the surface of the cloth and rubs it in, depositing the cat’s personal signature on the furniture. This is why is always your favorite chair that seems to suffer most attention, because the cat is responding to your won personal fragrance and adding to it. Some people buy an expensive scratching post from a pet shop, careful impregnated with catnip to make it appealing, and are bitterly disappointed when the cat quickly ignores it and returns to stropping the furniture. Hanging an old sweatshirt over the scratching post might help to solve the problem, but if a cat has already established a particular chair or a special part of the house as its “stropping spot” it is extremely hard to alter the habit.