Cat behavior.......scratching the Carpet

If you recently moved, he is christening the new place. Get a scratcher, like the cardboard ones that they sell at the pet store. It comes with catnip. Sprinkle the catnip all over the scratcher. Then put double sided tape over any area of the carpet that he has been scratching. Or tape aluminum foil over any area he has been scratching. What you want to do basically is make a really attractive area for him to do this...and make all the areas he has been doing it, unattractive. Good luck

Have you given him a place that he is allowed to scratch? Get a cat toy or even better an carpet remnant and whenever he starts scratching move him to "his" carpet. Move his paws on it like he's scratching so he knows it's ok. He'll get the hang of it.

He is bored. :)
Cats are predominately night creatures. Oh, they will learn the household habits, and adjust, but yours is a young cat. We live with 4 cats, and I have two who prefer to roam the house all night. Which is fine until something goes "crash" at 3 in the morning. LOL

Some ideas for your kitty:

Try engaging him in active playtime before bedtime - literally, try and wear him out, so he is too tired to stay up.

Get him a scratching post, and, as another poster said, "train" him to use it. Seed it with catnip if you have to.

Try a kennel (like one used for smalls dogs) but big enough to put a small litter pan in one end and food/water the other end, for him to hang out in at night. Blankets and toys, also. Just like a dog, if you begin feeding him in there, with the door open, during the day, he may come to accept it as "his place" and spend the night in it. Put in the apartment farthest away from the bedrooms. P.S. The laundry room became his place.

Where does your other cat sleep at night? If the other one sleeps in a bedroom behind a closed a door, you may want to try having it out with this cat.

Be patient, keep correcting it, they eventually get it.

Good Luck
God Bless

Get a cat carrier - or medium dog carrier and put him in it with a very small bowl of food and water. It's only 7-9 hours overnight and most cats will not pee or poop in there. I have to do that with some of my cats when they need to be separated for one thing or another.

Check to make sure he's not spraying where he's scratching.. If he is, have the carpet shampooed or look under it if you can pull it up and make sure there wasn't a cat there before you spraying. If not, get a scratching post. They are made out of thin carpet and wood.

I feel your pain!! Our 2 cats have similar behaviors when doors are closed in our house, like when guests are over. I suggest a few things..first, give your cat a place to scratch and/or sleep. We bought a big cat tree with scratching posts on it at a pet store, and put it in our bedroom. Both cats LOVE it so much, they scratch it and sleep on it every night..the best part is that they see us sleep, so they sleep too! Next, we put duct tape on our front door (one of our cats likes to scratch it), and it seemed to stop her behavior, because she doesn't like the way it feels on her paws. I've also heard that aluminum foil on the spot works as well. Your best bet after trying those things is to just catch it and correct the behavior when it happens. Our cats know what the word "no" means..and after they hear it a couple of times, they generally listen. Unless they're being particularly curious that day. :) Good luck!

When we adopted our kitty, we were told that cats NEED to scratch. They recommended a scratching post and said to put double sided tape where you don't want them to scratch because they hate the sticky feeling. I'm thinking that since your kitty likes scratching the carpet, and not the couch, maybe it would take better to a horizontal thing for cats to scratch on rather than a post.
Good luck!!! :o)

You have lot's of good advice already. We have a cat that likes to scratch the carpet too, scratching posts don't work for her. So we tried putting a scratch pad in the area's where she would scratch the carpet. It worked, now she scratches the scratch pad instead of the carpet in that area.

Try putting double sided tape on the floor where he scraches. They don't like the feel of it on their paws

My cat was constantly scratching the carpet on our bottom step and usually did it in the middle of the night as well. We finally had to declaw her. I really didn't want to do that, but carpet is expensive to replace and she just wouldn't stop! I've heard that they don't like the smell of citrus, so we tried spraying some spray with citrus in that area and that didn't work either. We also sprayed her with water when we caught her doing it and it really didn't faze her much. We have two cats and the other one isn't fond of strangers, particularly children, and would swat at people with her paw. I was afraid of some poor kid getting in her face and getting a claw to the eye, so we just declawed both of them. It really was the only solution we could come up with to keep people and property safe around here. :-(

Hope you find something that works.

The one other suggestion I can make is that they make these glue on nail covers for cats called "Soft Paws". We used those for our cats when they were younger and before we had small children. They worked great, you just replace them as they fall off. The only issue is that they DO fall off and I didn't want my baby to find one in the carpet and eat it, so we stopped using them when our daughter started crawling. I'm not sure how old your baby is, but this may be an option for you. You can Google them and I'm sure you'll find a site that sells them. Good luck!

You already have good advice here. If you can, see what's under the carpeting. And your 4H daughter should be able to get some input from other 4Hers who have done projects with cats. If you can solve this problem, she needs to include it in her project!

It's true that cats LOVE to play at night. Even my fifteen-year-old kitty gets up and carouses at three a.m. I have cat perches (not cat posts, which are too light for grown kitties) on each floor of my house. I got mine at yard sales, but a new one from the pet supply store would be worth every penny. They're ugly pieces of furniture, in my opinion, but they are heavy, they have wide bases and won't tip, and they're carpeted all over. My cats have always loved climbing up and down them, sitting on top of them to look out the windows, and, of course, scratching the daylights out of 'em. Cats need to scratch somewhere! It's the way they're wired.

It seems to me that there used to be (and maybe still is) a carpet-padded strip that you could hang on a doorknob for a kitty to scratch. I've never tried one, but you could see if they're still available and read user reviews.

You could try (it may or may not work) spraying bitter apple every night where you don't want Mr. Kitty to play, and dropping a teaspoonful of dry catnip every night in places where you do want him to play. Can't hurt.

By the way, if you want to train your can with squirts of water, put a little vinegar in the water. Just a little - you don't want to hurt him! Make it just enough to be unpleasant. But give him some things he CAN do at the same time. Cats are toddlers with ADD, no matter what age the cats are.