A NEW CAT FLAP

We have very few near neighbours.  The nearest is the house behind us where the recently new owner has only a dog.  However, over the years we have had a few visiting cats that must have travelled a fair distance to arrive chez nous.

The latest is a black cat who came into the house via the cat flap and cleared Yvonne’s food bowl at least twice.  So we decided to get a microchip operated cat flap.  

We already have one in our UK house which we installed for Daisy and it worked really well. The  house there is in a residential area where there are numerous other cats, several of which made their way into the house at one time or another until we got the new cat flap.  That stopped them from coming in completely.

The new cat flap is battery operated and works by somehow recognising Yvonne’s microchip.  It was easy to install and set up.  You set it to programme mode and push the cat into the tunnel on the outside just once and that’s all.  It can be programmed to recognise several different cats as long as they are microchipped.  There is a slight delay of about a second before the lock releases to allow the cat to push the flap open and Yvonne got the hang of it straight away.

We had Yvonne microchipped in the hope that one day we would be able to take her to the UK with us but that is very unlikely to ever happen as she doesn’t cope with car journeys at all well.  I suppose that's because she was already an old cat at nine years old (the vet’s word) when we got her and she was clearly not used to travelling in a car.  Each trip is traumatic for her and us.  The vet supplied some tablets to give her which might help but even that in itself is a trauma.  In fact we haven’t even been brave enough to try it.  How do you give a tablet to a struggling, fighting, hissing, biting and scratching  cat?  So the furthest she goes is to the vet or the cattery, a journey of thirty or forty minutes respectively, each one a miserable experience.

However, it was worth the trouble of getting her chipped so that we could keep her safe in her own home and keep other unwelcome cats out.  The new cat flap has four settings;  completely locked, fully open, in only and out only.  We keep it on fully open so that Yvonne can come and go as she pleases but we're sure there will be times when the other functions could come in handy.

You do have to remember to change the batteries occasionally - otherwise the cat can be left out in the cold unable to get inside (or vice versa).