Cats are good at a great many things. But perhaps one of their strongest talents is thwarting human efforts to control their behavior.

That’s not to say that you can’t train a cat – you certainly can get it to behave properly with the right tools and lots of patience – but you’d better have a back-up plan in case your cat has some unexpected behavioral quirks.

Alright cat, you better think twice the next time you decide to chew on the blinds pic.twitter.com/0A97ldbSnE

— CLG MajinPhil (@majinphil) October 6, 2018

We’ve long known that training by punishment doesn’t work – in fact, it often backfires. Still, most of us have come to think of things like spray bottles as a perfectly innocent deterrent to keep cats from misbehaving. (It’s worth noting that many cats will simply hide their bad behavior or harbor resentment as a result.)

Of course, watching a cat disobey you while looking you straight in the eyes can be a frustrating experience.

When Lacy Findley decided to use a spray bottle on her cat Poppy to keep her from scratching the coffee table, not only did she learn that the tactic didn’t work, it utterly backfired on her.

Poppy embraced the so-called “punishment.”

Part of the issue was that Poppy had always been obsessed with water. Findley even checked with a vet to make sure the cat wasn’t dehydrated or ill.

“When we first got her as a kitten, I was worried she had some sort of kidney problem but the vet checked her out and said that she was healthy, just weird,” Findley told The Dodo.

Being weird is a pretty common diagnosis for cats.

Poppy is no kitten. She’s 10 years old and well aware of what she’s not supposed to be doing. She just doesn’t care.

“I keep a lot of different scratching items for her but it’s never as appealing as the coffee table. I frequently catch her scratching the table while making eye contact with me,” Findley said.

It’s not clear if the scratching is relatively recent or if Findley has spent a decade trying different deterrents.

So, despite her love of water, Findley figured that Poppy probably wouldn’t like being sprayed with it. She squirted the cat whenever she went near the coffee table.

Unfortunately for mom, Poppy LOVES getting sprayed!

And now she associates this “treat” with the behavior Findley was trying to discourage. (We don’t have high hopes for the life of the coffee table.)

“I thought a spray bottle would help teach her to not scratch furniture. Now she scratches wooden furniture when she’s thirsty,” Findley wrote in a post on Facebook that has since been removed.

That meant she’d have to give up the spray bottle altogether (or at least get it away from her precious piece of furniture).

She does, however, let Poppy play with it occasionally.

Poppy’s isn’t the first spray bottle intervention to backfire on a cat owner.

In 2016, another cat owner posted her kitty’s reaction to hearing the bottle come out.

Cat Loves Spray Bottle from r/funny

Plenty of others chimed in to say the spray bottle strategy had backfired on them as well:

“I tried using a spray bottle to get my cat to stop scratching the walls. It didn’t seem to work. After a while, I caught on. She was doing it on purpose. She would scratch a wall then look down the hallway. If I didn’t move, she’d do it again. If I got up, she’d run and hide until I finally sprayed water in her face. After a few minutes she would come to my room and be all cuddly like nothing ever happened.”

The cats have outsmarted us yet again.

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Source: The Dodo, Feline Behavior Solutions