My experience using the water bottle with my cat Loki is that he very quickly figured out that if I'm not in the room, I can't spray him. He's starting to learn that if I'm in the room, but I don't have the bottle, I still can't spray him. Depends how clever your cat is - some of them are smart enough to know they're misbehaving and avoid getting caught.
Double stick tape worked wonders with him, though - the tape was still on the furniture weather I was in the room or not. Tinfoil didn't, since he just tore it up and played with it.
The best post of this thread. All this is exactly right, and you even explained it well, to boot, lol. It's true, spraying a cat teaches her nothing more than that her human is inflicting blasts of water on her ("Shunnnnn!"), and as long as she knows you're not in the room, she'll go back to her regular behaviour. It's not because she's a bad kitty or spiteful: she doesn't see anything wrong with it. She just knows that sometimes, out of nowhere, her human turns on her and sprays her, sending her running. She doesn't connect the water with being on the tank or the table or counter or whatever. Soon as you walk back in the room and she jumps off the tank and goes running, it's not because she knows she's been a naughty girl: she's waiting for that blast of water that seems to follow her human around.
I don't care when one of my girls, Buffy, hops on the tanks, because the fish don't seem bothered, but she loves to "investigate" bags with smells of food coming from them, so if I have a package of fish food on the lid, she's sure to knock it over. If it's not closed, or if Jake my dog is waiting below, the food is a goner. But I anticipate it and when the bag falls over, I can catch it. And anyway, a few times now I've had the lid off to do water changes and Buffy hasn't seen that, so when she jumps, so goes swimming. Well, swimming in the way only a cat can: a millisecond where the front paws are padding in the water while the back paws are curling their little toes around the rim of the tank wall, then all four paws are cradling the wall in desperation before kitty jumps off, never to return (for the rest of the week, anyway, lol). Besides, when Buffy jumps on the tank, it's because she wants attention (*cough*food*cough*) and being on the lid puts her eye level with me. So long as I feed her on time, she keeps away from the fish.
