Cats DOT SCRATCH cars
Cats are blamed by car owners who think that happiness is a “nice forever in mint-condition car” when they notice scratches after seeing a cat sitting on it. Some town council officers will respond to such car owners who complain by engaging the pest controllers to round up all the cats in the car park, even if not these cats are not the one sitting on that car!
Many such innocent cats have lost their lives in areas where there are no care-givers to speak out against such gross “social injustice”.
Please speak to your town council officer (search for your town council here) to tell him/her that you will help to resolve any complaint about cats in your estate and he/she is NOT to ask the pest controller (in some estate, the estate contracted cleaning company is also the pest controller) to trap any cat to be killed at the AVA before speaking to you.
The quick answer is that car duco - if its in half decent condition - is extremely hard (its baked for at least half an hour at over 300º since it has to withstand road gravel hitting it etc). And cats claws are the same hardness as our fingernails. So unless you can scratch off the paint with your fingernail, there is *no way* a cat can scratch the *paint* of the surface of a car that’s in a fairly good condition. (Paint does weather though and if its in a really bad state, it can be scratched, but if its that bad it should be a funny colour of white and be in the junk yard).
However, if the car has been *waxed*, the cat’s claws (and your fingernails) can remove some of the wax, leaving what looks likes scratches in the paint, but are in fact just places where the surface of the wax has been removed. But then again a cat just walking across a car doesn’t *use* claws, so the only way that the cat could scratch the car is if it was trying to somehow get traction on the surface, by either falling off or (dare I say) running for its life.
The worst a cat can do to in normal circumstances is leave cute little muddy cat prints - annoying but not inherently damaging.
Victoria Chapman, BSc, Paint Technologist,