Donald Trump, the Pope and maybe even the ancient Chinese could all take a lesson from the Laurel Street damncats: Walls don’t work.
At least not the wall recently heightened by the next door neighbor to discourage members of our damncat colony from visiting. This came after they re-landscaped and tiled the backyard and built an outdoor kitchen under a beautiful cedar purgola. Then they put a thick layer of new mulch along the flower beds of the yard’s perimeter.
Mulch as we know it is not ideal for discouraging damncats who assume that someone has thoughtfully furnished it for their convenience and necessity. That’s when the neighbors extended the height of the fence between our backyard and theirs, up to about 12 feet.
I think it might have slightly reduced the damncat traffic — at first anyway. Not that the damncats can’t scale the wooden fence if they have to, but what feline among them wants to go to that trouble if it can be avoided. Besides that, damncats approach anything new, even the most mundane things, with an abundance of caution, and the newly-heightened fence was far from mundane.
But after a couple of weeks we began to notice one or two  walking along the top of the fence. Of course it’s one-way traffic and a passive damncat would be forced to give way to a dominant damncat going in the opposite direction. That would involve a difficult 180 degree turn on a narrow surface or a more humiliating jump or a backwards descent down the face of the fence, none good options for a damncat’s psyche. No longer able to view the neighbor’s backyard from anywhere other that our upstairs back porch, I can’t tell whether or not the damncats are still making their way to the mulch for convenience and necessity.  If they are, I expect we will hear about it.