Cat question--need answers sort of quickly

Hi Diane,

Cats Spray. That is just a fact. Are there other cats in the household? Are there possibly neighbor cats walking around outside that she sees and so she is spraying? I do not know about the pooping. If she is really skinny, she probably has worms. Sometimes small kittens forget where their litter box is and it helps to confine her until she realizes.

I had a kitten that went on antibiotics and it gave him diarhea. Apparently, it freaked him out, because he would go flying through the house dripping all the way. He is fine now. We have a two story house and when we had kittens, we had to have a litterbox upstairs and down so they could make it to it in time.

On the other hand, some cats are just really bad markers. We have to watch Banjo when she comes in. Anything on the floor she will pee in. She peed down the heating vents! We had to have our duct work cleaned. Now she is an outdoor cat except on cold winter nights. We let her in, but she usually goes right back out and she is not allowed in certain rooms where we know she has peeing problems.

I have 11 cats and once a week I go around with my urine off and clean up spray marks. It works really well and friends say they don't smell cat urine in my house. I beg them to tell me the truth.

Good Luck. Cats are a mystery.

Debbie 

In my experience with cats, they seem to spray and mark when there are too many cats around.  My sister has 3 cats who originally didn't spray, but she let a neighbor's cat come in to visit through the cat door, and now all of her cats are marking.

I've never had a problem with cats spraying, and I've owned a lot of cats.  But I had a male kitten who had extreme problems with peeing and pooping everywhere.  From the time he was just a baby, he would poop and pee in the wierdest places.  I placed litter boxes all around the house, but he would go on a pile of my financial papers, or in the kids' puzzle box, on top of the folded up rubber wading pool, and on stacked clothes.  I had him tested for any health problems and he was fine.  After 1 1/2 yrs, I was pretty impatient with it, and then he jumped in the big plastic tub of legos, while my son was sitting there playing with them, and peed all over a million legos!

My husband took him to a no-kill shelter.  I felt bad, because I'd never given up on a cat before.  But he was impossible.

sally 

My vet told me once that if the cat pees outside the litter box it needs to be checked for a urinary tract infection or other problem.  It seems that if the cat is experiencing pain when it pees (or poops) in the litter box, it will associate the pain with the box.  Then, it will avoid it and do it's business anywhere.

We found this out because, years ago, our elderly, spayed, female cat was peeing ON THE RANGE TOP!  We'd get up in the morning, go to make the coffee and find dried pee in the burner wells!

Once treated, the cat was fine and no more illegal peeing.  Good luck.

I have a male cat that went through peeing outside the litter box for awhile.  I placed litter boxes right where he was peeing and he would pee right next to the litter box.  We wanted to find a solution prior to replacing the subfloor.  I tried just about everything that I could think of and just about everything that people recommended to me and the combination that worked in my case was using "cat attrack" litter.  There is some scent to it that they like.  I have two cats with three litter boxes.  At first I only put the new litter in the two boxes that he never used - and he actually started using them. So I changed the litter in the third box too (I had been using the same litter since he was a kitten).  The other thing is that I put pheremone plug in into the room that the downstairs litter box is in (his preferred litter box).  It is like a glade plug in, but you get it at the pet store.

Anyways, he started using the litter boxes again, even with the pee scent very prevalent which allowed us to be more comfortable in replacing the floor boards. 

We had taken him to the vet early on and there were no medical causes.

Good luck!  It can be soooo frustrating.