Blocking out specific URLs with robots.txt

[Whebb]

I've been trying to block out a few URLs using robots.txt, but I can't seem to get the specific one I'm trying to block. Here is an example.

I'm trying to block

something.com/cats

but not block

something.com/cats-and-dogs

It seems if it setup my robots.txt as so..

Disallow: /cats

It's blocking both urls. When I crawl the site with screaming flog, that Disallow is causing both urls to be blocked.  How can I set up my robots.txt to specifically block /cats? I thought it was by doing it the way I was, but that doesn't seem to solve it.

Any help is much appreciated, thanks in advance.

[LesleyPaone]

You can either use /cats/ or /cats/* that should just block the cats folder and not the other folder. Note the first use is the preferred one.

[Modi]

Do not play with Robots as it may block out series of pages and folders out of index

Correct command as stated by Lesley is /cats/ . Refer official documentation

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt