Posted on 08/10/2008 9:17:48 PM PDT by Huntress
Dear FReeper Cat Fanciers:
I've had a one human, two cat household for the past six years. I moved into my current home about nine months ago. Since then, both cats, Norman and Betty (see my homepage for pics), have lived in relative harmony and shared one large litter box. Recently, however, I've started to hear yowling at night from the litterbox room, and one of the cats has taken to urinating on the carpet in the corner of the dining room. I've cleaned up numerous messes, and have been trying to figure out what the problem is.
My first theory was that one of them has a urinary tract infection, and is going outside the box because it associates the litterbox with pain. In order to figure out which cat has an aversion to the litterbox, I picked up each one and attempted to place it in the box. Betty resisted vigorously, and I was unable even to force her inside. Then I tried the same thing with Norman. He seemed displeased, but didn't resist too much. I got him halfway in, when Betty went absolutely berzerk and attacked him. I've never seen her behave this way, and she stayed mad for a long time, growling at me whenever I approached.
After this encounter, I came up with my second theory: they are having a litterbox territorial dispute. So I got a second litterbox. I wanted this one to be Norman's, so I picked him up and set him down inside it. He jumped out and ran off as Betty went berzerk again. Norman sought refuge in the garage, where he and Betty are in the midst of a standoff.
Betty is the dominant cat of the two, and she is definitely the agressor in this situation. I am now at a loss. I can't figure out why this problem is happening now, after six years, why Betty is behaving this way, and what to do about it.
Any ideas, theories, or possible solutions?
Thanks.
Huntress
I have 2 cats myself.. cats are jerks, they think they own the world, they do exactly as they please and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it short of having them put down. That’s life!
I just talked to the hubby & we are gonna remove her food away from her box upstairs. I really thank you for your words of wisdom and it is so much appreciated!!!!!!
There’s gotta be something about the move to the new place that did it. Past animal smells in the carpet/corner. A new place and they haven’t yet mapped out the house and settled the dominance issues in the new space. Often a change in environment can cause a power shift (or attempted one).
Does she go after him if he goes to the bathroom outside the litterpan? Perhaps that’s the only place he can go without getting into a huge scuffle. He may be yowling because she is going after him even though he’s not in the litterpan. But he’s gotta go sometime.
Maybe the safest thing for them is to separate them by floors or something, so they can settle in and be able to keep using litterpans, and then after they seem to be okay, try to re-bond them.
Pill wedged inside a little tuna ball.
DOn’t put her down for this. There is always a reason for why an animal’s behavior turns negative. Usually it is in reaction to a change that we don’t think is a big deal, but it is to them. Something in your routine changes, new people around, liked people gone, a move, furniture rearrangement, food changes, work noise around the house, changes to their normal routine, favorite toy(s) gone, etc. Think about when it started to happen, and jot down everything going on around that time and see if anything obvious sticks out as a possibility.
it is easy to get the sample by holding the cat when it has to go, the hard part is separating your blood from the urine.
One thing you might consider doing is getting a large cat litterpan, and putting the plant inside it, so if she is going to keep going there, it will be in a litterbox.
Maybe she just wants to use that corner as her litterbox corner.
“enclosed space” - good point. My neighbor uses the bottom level of one of her bathroom closets to put her cat litterpans.
Great idea!
Again, my pleasure.
Make sure kitty knows where her new food & water location is, and give her a little time to adjust. Also (just occurred to me) clean up her behind-the-plants pooping spot with a product designed to remove cat scents so that it doesn’t smell like a litterbox.
If this doesn’t work, then, as Secret Agent Man suggested, bow to the inevitable and move the litterbox behind the plants - kitty has told you where she wants to poop.
Kitty is doing time in the bathroom now. I hope all the advice that has been given to me tonight will work. I don’t want to get rid of my daughters cat.
“it is easy to get the sample by holding the cat when it has to go, the hard part is separating your blood from the urine.”
Best belly laugh I’ve had in awhile...lol
Six cats in our relatively harmonious household, and I’ve raised a lot of rescued kittens. My take:
1) Definitely take both felines to the vet and rule out a UTI. Assuming neither has one, while you are there, beg the vet for some kitty valium or similar.
2) Resign yourself to maintaining two litter boxes from now on, and it’s best if they are in different rooms. We have had problems in the past with one cat very suddenly deciding the box was his alone (or hers alone). When that happens, there really is no remedy except separate boxes.
3) Re the kitty valium: It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally cats that are perfectly friendly toward one another will get a wild hair and decide that the other cat is the source of some problem they are having (such as the pain from a UTI, or maybe just getting frightened of something for no reason that humans can comprehend). Then you may need to separate the cats for anywhere from a day to a week or so, and re-introduce them gradually, as if they were strangers. I have found in these cases that drugging both cats a little really helps. We had a pair of brother cats that we had to take back from their owner and re-home. They had always gotten along very, very well. For some reason, on the way back to our house, they both decided that the brother was the source of their woes, and by the time we got them home, they were both wild-eyed, spitting maniacs. We tried separating them and re-introducing them without drugs, and it just didn’t work. But I had some leftover kitty valium from a cross-country trip we had made with our cats, and giving them some of that and then re-introducing finally worked.
4)Pick up some Feliway at your local humongous pet store. It is kitty pheromones that make cats feel nice and mellow. I have used it before, and it really is helpful. Do not spray it directly on your cats, but do spray it everywhere they hang out.
Cautions: DO take the cats in to your vet for physicals. Don’t skip that step. Do NOT use any human drugs in place of the kitty valium. It is easy to overdose a tiny cat, and in addition, some drugs are toxic to cats. You don’t want to kill the cat while trying to solve your problem!
Good luck! Let us know how it all comes out!
Best of luck.
Contact a reputable Animal Communicator. That’s correct, I am not joking.
Possible solution: Put both litter boxes in the same room but a distance away from each other. Put some paper towels down where one cat is urinating on the rug. Try to get some of his urine on the paper towels and get some of that (gloves, shred the papers) into his litter box under or in his litter, so he knows it’s his. (Or clip out a bit of the rug and do it...)
I’m not sure why they started doing this. Maybe one cat was dominant and the other one is trying to challenge him.
Put each cat, separately, into his own litter box and force his front paw to scrape in the sand, then let him jump out. Be affectionate and loving. Every couple of hours, put a cat gently in his litter box and gently make him scrape. If you find any cat poop (and you know who it’s from), put it in the proper box and leave at least one in there until they get it straight.
Hope that helps.
Re: cat urine is forever -- There is a simple cat urine formula that actually works. Anything else is just a cover-up and/or smells worse than the cat pee itself. Put in a 1-quart spray bottle, and swirl around:
16 oz (.5 liter) of hydrogen peroxide 3%
2 teaspoons of baking soda
2 drops of liquid dish soap (e.g., Ivory Liquid)
The hydrogen peroxide does the work, but it requires a basic (as in non-acidic) environment to act on the cat pee smell. (It was actually developed for skunk smell, but the principle is the same.) The peroxide is a mild bleach, of course, so be cautious about using it on fabrics.
Visit The Skunk Remedy Homepage for more information. The recipe, originally for skunk odor, has changed since we started using it several years ago. It now calls for a quarter cup of baking soda and 2 teaspoons of dish detergent, but this would be overkill for the cat pee application, leaving tons of residue behind. The recipe above works very well, and remains stable in the spray bottle for at least a couple of weeks, in case you need to use it more than once.
-- Prisoner of eleven cats
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