Amtek Scraminal

I can't give this thing a high enough rating. We have a puppy, and some time shortly after we got her she concluded that the reason our living room has corners is so that you have somewhere you can poop when you can't find Mommy or Daddy and get them to let you outside. Or when you don't want to find Mommy or Daddy. Or when it's Tuesday. And we tried everything, I swear. My wife and I both have some experience training dogs, and we did a lot of the usual stuff, both positive and negative reinforcement, but we just couldn't shake her of her living-room-is-for-pooping habit. She's a well-trained dog, actually, and today she's an AKC-Certified Canine Good Citizen (CGC), but back over the summer we just couldn't shake her of her bad habit. Finally, in a fit of frustration after having spent hundreds of dollars on cleaners, I bought a few different beepers on Amazon all at the same time. I tried each one for a few days. And this is the one that worked -- and it worked on the very first day. For the record, this didn't do much to deter our cats (one cat just flat-out ignored it, and the other concluded that she had to run very fast past it to avoid it "seeing" her -- and, of course, it beeped at her every time). If you're buying this to keep your cats away from things, best of luck to you. I've debated trying to use it to keep our cats out of the kitchen sink at night, but I'm pretty sure it would have no real effect on them. But with our dog -- now that's a whole different story. On the very first day it scared her away from the living room. By the end of a week, she had learned exactly where it was protecting, and she had learned not to cross that line. By the end of a month, we turned it off, because we hadn't needed it for quite some time. For the record, this gizmo does not beep: It screeches like your house is being stolen. That's great if you want to keep pets out of a room, and believe me, it works -- but not so much when you're trying to sleep. So if there's one bad thing I can say about this, it's that cats + Scraminal + 3 AM = a very bad night's sleep. And I'd be careful of using this in an apartment where you have thin walls. Still, the thirty bucks I spent on this little gizmo managed to beat out hundreds of dollars I spent on cleaning and hundreds more for dog training. We were looking to buy a major multi-year investment in the Nature's Miracle Pet Cleaner company before I bought the Scraminal, and now I can't even remember the last time I scrubbed the carpet. As I write this posting, the Scraminal is out of stock, which is sad, because it's worth its weight in gold. If you have a dog, and this comes back into stock, buy one. Seriously. Do it before it's sold out again. And, for the record, no, I won't sell you mine.