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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/Deadddino on 2025-12-05 11:05:00+00:00.
So today I decided to clean my cats tree because he throws up a lot and I didn’t want him to have to sleep in his residual dried puke anymore. (No advice needed, me and his vet are already working on it/looking into why.)
Dish soap did almost nothing to get any kind of stain out from his puke and I recently got an upholstery cleaner, originally for my mattress, so I looked at the ingredients list to make sure there’s no bleach or chlorine in it or if that warning tag about it being a danger to nature is on it. There was none, so I thought “sure that’s gonna be fine”.
Before you frantically write a concerned, potentially passive-aggressive comment, I already disassembled the tree and locked it into my basement. My cat was only in the room for like 5 minutes, a window was open and he made no contact with the foam. Don’t worry, bare with me.
Back to what I was doing.
I then proceeded to thoroughly clean his more than stained cat tree, rinsing it with water and dabbing that out of there, when it occurred to me to actually google all ingredients. Don’t ask me why I didn’t just do that up front, I have no idea.
Turns out the main ingredient (aliphatic hydrocarbons) is incredibly toxic to cats and is apparently an oil-based chemical binding to fabric so tightly, it’s almost impossible to ever get it out of anything that’s not a smooth surface like plastic or metal.
Well, now I had to get rid of the kind of expensive cat tree I got him not even half a year ago and order a new one. He wasn’t very pleased that I had to take it away from him and I doubt he’ll not give me shit for the next week while waiting for his new one to get delivered.
I don’t know if anyone needs this advice because in retrospect I feel more than very stupid, but clean your cats stuff with water and vinegar or buy an enzyme cleaner that has a specific label to be cat/pet friendly. Cat livers seem to lack a hella of a lot of enzymes to break down chemicals.
TL;DR: cleaned my cat’s tree with upholstery cleaner, that turned out to be highly toxic to cats. Cat didn’t get in contact with it, cat is fine.