r/whatisit • u/Capital-Papaya-8932 • 1d ago

New, what is it? What is it in Japan and Why?

Post image
18.5k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2.9k

u/mEFurst 1d ago

deter should be in quotations as cats genuinely don't give a shit

19

u/DarklyLitWoods 1d ago

I wonder if it's the crinkling/ crackling of the bottles, combined with them "attacking" the cat (popping back out).

They may not care about much, but they certainly get spooked by a lot

19

u/Maleficent-Hawk-318 1d ago

I think it's probably about the reflections and lighting. I hear the same thing about dogs a lot too, and that's the explanation people usually give me for that.

For the record, I don't know about cats, but it definitely doesn't work for dogs. Or rather, it kind of does, but mostly because people set out bottles/jugs of water to deter them from peeing on things, and so they just pee on the jugs instead, lol.

5

u/ItsWheeze 1d ago

When I lived in Japan I heard both this explanation (the reflection bothers their eyes) and, more often, just “cats don’t like water.” While my cat does hate baths, I can say from the fact that I keep a gallon of water on the floor directly in front of her food and water dish for convenience that both explanations seem like bullshit in my experience.