Our cats love the cat climbing pole. They really like a tree-like pole to climb up. In hindsight, I probably should have ordered the version without the leaf shelves because they like to grab on and climb up and we have found the leaf shelves are just in the way where they have to maneuver around the shelves where we bought the three tier which is no problem for them to just grip and climb. I will say during installation we ran into an issue where we did not have a reliable tool to find the stud widths. We tried a magnetic tool and the usual tools that beep with a LCD screen. Both were too inaccurate for this installation where the two screws for the anchor require a level of accuracy. I finally found a tool that was very accurate where it lights up with blocks to show you the exact location and width of the stud where our studs were 5 blocks wide. I only knew this existed when I ran into the problem we had where one of my screws skidded off the sided of the stud and I did not realized it and the friction resulted in a burning smell which freaked us out if we had spared a fire in our wall. I only found this tool after we were freaked out any my g/f had a panick attack where I watched multiple youtube videos from this company where one video was a guy showing how to do custom layouts where he had a tool that had the lit up blocks. So, I was like WHOA...I NEED THAT. Once I got that, then setting up everything was easy. We used this climbing pole as the starter for them to climb to get onto the other shelves and bed we bought as shown in the picture. I will say though that the other issue we encountered as we tried to do our due diligence to plan before we buy was with the assumption each stud was 16 inches apart. Unfortunately, with inaccurate stud finding tools, we did not find out until we got this awesome stud finding tool that her studs were not 16 inches apart. So, we could not use the 18inch shelf and hammock bed we bought because those assumed 16 inch studs. So, now those are just sitting in the closet since we cannot use them. :(
but in any event, we love this climbing pool, but please make sure you get the stud finding tool that had the lit up blocks so you have an accurate assessment of your stud locations and distance they are apart. Lesson learned that I hope saves others what we ran into unfortunately where we cannot use two pieces we bought.