The Best Gifts for Cat Owners — Approved by the Cat

Ask any cat owner what actually annoys them and litter tracked across the floor comes up before anything else. A litter mat catches most of it at the source, in the two steps between the box and the rest of the house. When Your Best Digs tested seven litter mats side by side, they ranked the Gorilla Grip a runner-up, singling out its coil-and-groove design for trapping kicked-out litter that a flat mat lets through.

The reason this one works as a gift is that it is a problem everybody has and almost nobody gets round to solving. It sits permanently on the mental list of things to buy eventually. Giving it removes a small daily irritation that has been running for years.

Buy larger than seems necessary. The common mistake is a mat that only covers the immediate exit, when cats routinely leap out sideways. The tradeoff behind that runner-up finish is cleaning: Your Best Digs picked a fabric mat as their outright winner because it goes straight into the washing machine, while this one traps litter in coils that resist a vacuum and need a weekly shake-out instead.

Plenty of cats will ignore a full bowl and then drink from a running tap, and PetMD lists low water intake among the risk factors behind concentrated urine and bladder crystals, which is why the preference is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as fussiness. A Catit Flower Fountain turns that preference into something the owner does not have to supervise, though PetMD is careful to note a fountain helps some cats drink more and not others, so wet food and extra water bowls are worth trying alongside it rather than instead of it.

As a present it lands well because it looks like a thoughtful gift and behaves like a practical one. Forbes’s review called it a reliable, top-notch pick for the price and recommended it specifically to first-time fountain buyers and owners of picky cats, crediting the three flow settings for giving a fussy drinker more than one chance to find water it likes.

Be honest about the maintenance when you hand it over: a fountain needs rinsing weekly and a filter change every few weeks, and an unmaintained fountain is worse than a bowl. For an owner who will do that, it is one of the most useful things here.

For a long-haired cat, a FURminator deShedding tool produces an immediately obvious result. FURminator’s own product pages claim the tool cuts loose shedding hair by up to 90 percent with regular use, and the amount it lifts on the first session tends to surprise people who thought they were already brushing enough.

Less hair on the furniture is the visible benefit; fewer hairballs is the one the cat cares about. PetMD names regular brushing as one of the more effective ways to cut hairball frequency, since hair that comes out on a tool is hair that never gets swallowed and re-deposited on the carpet later.

Use it gently and briefly. It is an edged tool rather than a soft brush, and cats have thinner skin than dogs, so short sessions with no pressure are the rule. Buy the cat-specific version rather than the dog one, and match it to coat length.

The Litter Genie is aimed squarely at anyone who currently walks to an outside bin every single day, which is most people in an apartment. Waste goes into a sealed liner, and Catster’s review of the system credited the pail’s air-tight seal with keeping odour contained even as it fills up.

It makes a bigger difference to daily life than its price suggests, and it is another of those items that sits on the someday list indefinitely. Multi-cat households feel the benefit fastest.

The catch is the refill cartridges. Catster’s review notes one cartridge runs about two months for a single cat, but drops closer to two weeks once a second cat shares the box, which is the ongoing cost worth budgeting for and the reason some owners eventually switch to a lined bin with a tight lid. If you are giving it, adding a spare refill makes it a complete present rather than one that needs a follow-up purchase.

Most scratching posts fail for two boring reasons: too short for a full stretch, and wobbly enough that the cat does not trust it. The SmartCat Ultimate Scratching Post fixes both, which is why cats actually use it instead of the arm of the sofa; Cats.com ranked it the top scratching post in its 2026 testing roundup, pointing to the 32-inch height and a wide base that does not wobble.

That makes it one of the few pet products where the expensive option is genuinely the cheaper one. A post that gets ignored has cost the full price of a post plus a sofa.

The sisal is coarse and unglamorous rather than decorative, and it sheds fibres in the first weeks. Cats.com’s own testers flagged one honest caveat: a few of their older, smaller cats were uninterested in scratching it because the sisal felt too tough underpaw, so this suits a normal adult cat better than a senior one. If the recipient’s cat is already committed to one specific piece of furniture, place the post directly in front of it rather than in a tidy corner, or the gift fails for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.

For an owner with an outdoor cat that disappears for hours, Tractive GPS tracker answers the only question that matters, which is where the animal currently is. It uses cellular GPS rather than Bluetooth, so range is not the limitation.

Two things need saying plainly before you buy it. It requires an ongoing subscription and will not work without one, since the tracker has its own SIM. All in, that is roughly $187 for the first year: about $79 for the hardware plus $108 for the cheapest annual plan, so budget the whole amount as the gift rather than handing over a device with a bill attached.

And it must go on a quick-release safety collar, never a fixed one, an outdoor cat that snags a non-breakaway collar on a fence is in real danger. Check the cat is big enough to carry the weight comfortably too; it suits an average adult cat and not a small or elderly one.