need baby gates and have cats....

[spartabella]

I think we need to go with the tension-mounted ones because we have wall on one side and a railing post on the other (plus, we'll be moving this year to another house and I don't want to drill holes in the bannister)...

The problem is that we have a few cats and their litter box is on the lowest level of the house - so I need a gate to block the stairs for our new crawler - but then the cats can't get to their box! Does anyone know of any brand that cats can get through but babies can't?

[Momof3Labs]

There are no gates out there that are made to let cats through but not babies because they would not meet safety standards.

You need to put a hardware mounted gate at the top of stairs - a pressure mounted gate is not at all safe there because it is too easy to push out of place. You don't have to drill a hole in the railing post, you can attach a piece of wood to it with cable ties and drill the gate into the piece of wood. Go ahead and drill into the drywall - that is very easy to repair.

When we need to give our cat access to a space but not baby, we put the gate a few inches higher off the ground. Or you may have to cut a small hole in the gate. But keep in mind that whatever you do to the gate, you need to be sure that only the cats can get through.

[NEVE and TRISTAN]

We have mounted gates that we installed just high enough that our cats can go under...until recently there was a month where even Tristan could fit under it...he'd flip his body around so fast and go feet first thru it.

The good news was the time that he knew he could do it and actually could fit was not long....we just had to do extra work to watch him.


Neve and Tristan born Feb 25, 2003
* EDD #2 3/18/05 as of 8/10 things looking "great"
*Traveling in Jan insearch of the rest of our family-adopting in Ukraine IF INS gets us paperwork intime (cross fingers)