Will your cat actually use a tunnel bed? Probably, but not where you put it

Every cat owner has bought a bed that was ignored in favour of the box it arrived in. It is such a reliable joke that people stop buying cat beds altogether.

The bed is rarely the problem. The placement almost always is.

Why enclosed spaces work

A cat asleep in the open is a cat that has to stay half-alert. Enclosed spaces solve three things at once: they hide the cat from view, they remove the possibility of being approached from behind, and they hold body heat, which matters more than people think — cats are comfortable at a notably higher temperature than we are.

That is why the cardboard box wins. It is not the novelty. It is that the box has walls.

The four reasons a new bed gets ignored

1. It is in the wrong place. This is the big one. Owners put the bed where it looks good — a corner of the living room, tidy, out of the way. Cats sleep where they already sleep. If your cat spends afternoons on the end of your bed, that is where the new one goes.

2. It smells wrong. New fabric smells of factory and plastic. Cats navigate a great deal by scent, and something that smells of nothing familiar is not restful.

3. It is too exposed. Middle of a room, in a walkway, near a door that opens suddenly. Cats want a wall behind them and a view of the entrance.

4. You put them in it. Picking a cat up and placing them in a bed reliably teaches them the bed is a thing that happens to them. It is the fastest way to guarantee they avoid it.

How to get one used

• Put it exactly where they already sleep, even if that is inconvenient. Move it later, a metre at a time, if you must.
• Make it smell like home. A worn t-shirt or a blanket from their current spot inside it for the first week.
• Catnip, sparingly — a light sprinkle, not a pile. Roughly a third of cats do not respond to it at all, so do not read a lack of interest as rejection of the bed.
• Leave it alone. No encouragement, no lifting them in. Cats investigate new objects on their own schedule, usually at night when nobody is watching.
• Give it two weeks before deciding it has failed.

Tunnel or bed?

Some cats want the enclosure. Some want the high sides but an open top so they can watch the room. You often cannot tell which yours is until you offer both.

Our tunnel bed buckles into a donut nest roughly 85 cm across, or unclips into a 160 cm tunnel. That is the practical argument for it: you are not committing to one guess about your cat's preference, and if the tunnel is ignored you still have a bed.

One honest caveat. It comfortably fits one cat. Two will use it, but one of them will end up sleeping on top rather than inside — which is fine, and not what most people picture when they buy it.

When a cat stops using a bed they liked

Worth noticing rather than shrugging at. A cat that suddenly abandons a favourite spot, starts sleeping somewhere unusually warm, or picks a hard surface over a soft one can be telling you something — older cats with sore joints often stop jumping to a preferred high spot and settle for somewhere they would previously have ignored.

Change in sleeping habit is one of the more reliable early signals in cats, precisely because they hide so much else.