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It is one of those "remedies" you can find everywhere: if you have trouble with cats in your flower beds, cats leaving their droppings in your garden (or burying their poop) you should use your coffee grounds to repel them.

There is a question (without a satisfying answer as far as I'm concerned) about it on sister-site gardening 1, but there are a lot of references to be found (see below).

What I did NOT find however is any solid evidence, references to actual research, etc etc, so the obvious skeptical question is: Is this an actual working solution? Do coffee grounds repel cats?

(btw: there are several other items mentioned in various locations that might merit their own question, but I thought it might be too much to try and (dis)prove them all in one question.

1) Gardening stackexchange: do coffee grounds in gardens deter cats?
2) http://www.wikihow.com/Repel-Cats (casually mentioned amongst others)
3) http://www.alleycat.org/Deterrents (also, casually)
4) http://www.ehow.com/how_2228385_keep-cats-away-home-remedies.html (with the warning sign "home remedy")
5) http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/pets/catpoop.html (some more places with -amongst others- coffee as a solution)

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Nanne
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    After a long search the best I could find was [a patent application](https://www.google.com/patents/US20070190095) that includes a horribly flawed experiment (Example 2: NOT statistically significant [by my back-of-envelope calculations], not peer reviewed, conflict of interest, poor control]) – Oddthinking Apr 29 '15 at 14:18
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    I suppose if you keep throwing them at the cat they'll get the message sooner or later :) – GordonM Apr 30 '15 at 15:17
  • Hmm. an almost 'eureka' after finding this [garden myths](http://www.gardenmyths.com/coffee-grounds-in-garden/) site. Sounds like a good place to find information, but sadly it says what we already know: _"I found this statement on some sites, but can’t confirm it or deny it."_ – Nanne Apr 30 '15 at 15:21

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