Happiness is a wet pussy

Move, and Kitty gets it. Hooray!

In recent years, the garden to the rear of my house became something of a giant litter tray to the neighbourhood's feline population. Not a day went by when a trip to put my bicycle into the shed for safekeeping did not involve my stepping into one of Tiddle's little warm cat eggs, pungent in their aroma and dangerous to the touch.

I perhaps have to declare an interest here, and state that I am emphatically not one of the world's millions of "cat lovers". To me, they display the same innate smugness and mendacity I associate with some of the more unpleasant members of the human race, such as Ms. Fearne Cotton, Mr. Timothy "Timmy" Mallett, and Mr. William Kenwright CBE. I fail to discern the attraction in keeping an animal as a pet which rewards your love, care and affection by shredding your soft furnishings, bringing you occasional "gifts" of mutilated sparrows which you are obliged to "finish off", urinating over your prized geraniums, and shitting in your muesli.

Perhaps as a response to the recent bouts of civil unrest in my local area, there has been an upsurge in vigilantism; now that the riotous assemblies have melted away, however, the brave Joe Publics appear to have selected other "deserving" targets for their ire. To address the problem of cats defecating in my pea gravel, I also considered the deployment of a battrey of air weapons; however, despite my intense distaste of feline excrement, I do not wish to cause any damage to the creatures on the grounds of my latent Buddhist beliefs and the fact that, unlike many of the local suburban paladins, I cannot afford the time to peer out of my back window all night with a loaded air rifle in the hope that an incursion occurs at some point. Additionally, I may incur the fearsome wrath my neighbours, cat owners both, if I were to spread the skull of one of their adorable little angels over my waney lap panelled fencing, like a tackhammer hitting a punnet of overripe strawberries.

Having discounted this option, I then took advice from others on how to deal with the problem. One well-meaning individual suggested the liberal dispensing of orange peel on the areas where cats tend to deposit their mess, on the grounds that they find the scent offensive. The cat's response to this was merely to urinate over the orange peel, do their business, scatter the pea gravel with their rear paws, sneer at me and turn away with their tails in the air, prominently displaying what appeared to be a small pink tea-towel holder.

Another suggested placing milk bottles around the garden, the theory being that the cat would cast sight of its own distorted reflection, sense a rival in the vicinity, turn tail and flee. This merely resulted in the cats posing in front of the milk bottles, admiring themselves in a manner akin to Narcissus. The only way of disengaging them from basking in their reflected beauty was to seek to deliver a hefty punt up their posteriors, but they were much too efficient in their evasive action.

The myriad sprays, plastic decoy animals and ultrasonic sound devices simply do not work, resulting only in an empty wallet and a shed filled with useless gadgetry, which may only be disposed of at so-called "car boot sales" at a hefty discount to another desperate individual with the same issues. I was at the point of purchasing two Jack Russell puppies with the intent of leaving them out to "play" in the garden all day; this would act as an obvious deterrent to any feline intruders, but would cause me the secondary problem of having to feed, inoculate and groom two stupid, yapping curs with an vicious temper and a propensity to eat the buttons off my shirts as they lie in the laundry basket. Plus, of course, they shit and piss too (in more obvious places than Tiddles and his ilk, however).

And then. Salvation arrived. In the shape of this:

This marvellous piece of apparatus combines a PIR motion sensor with a jet spray, effective to a range of ten metres. The apparatus is placed into the ground via a spike, preferably in a bank of foliage to render it invisible to even the keenest-eyed kitty. A garden hose is attached to the bottom of the unit, and the water is turned on. Then, one waits... and as Tiddles pops into the cone of fire to perform his ablutions, he is drenched by a high-powered arc of water, an event accompanied by a cacophony akin to a Mattel toy machine gun.

The unit has now been installed for two weeks. No cat's eggs have been laid in that time. The hilarity continues, however, as the unit does not discriminate between species, and the fat pigeons attempting to gorge themselves on the fruit of my elderberry trees also find themselves a target. Squirrels, too, have attempted many hilarious manoeuvres to attempt to outwit the sensor, with little or no success.

The success of the unit is such that even the urban foxes, which would often venture into the garden under cover of darkness in order to rip open my refuse sacks, or mark their territory in their atrocious-smelling vulpine piss, or indulge in group sex on my lawn, have not returned for quite some time. However, this may also potentially be attributed to the lingering scent of the festering carcass of one of their number which I captured, dispatched in the "halal" manner, divested of its skin, and hung from one of the branches of the tree at the rear of the shed. The sparrows seem to like it. They liked the eyes, especially.

Do others applaud this marvel of space-age motion-sensing technology?