Peeing & spraying

Forum members,

We have a problem with a male cat that is both spraying and (more recently) peeing outside the box.

Let me preface this posting by saying that we have owned many cats over the years (as well as other animals) and we are fairly well acquainted with animal behavior, problems and solutions.

Currently, we have only two cats, living in a house that to our knowledge, has never housed any animals. We have a 14 yr. old female and a 9 yr. old male. The older female is fairly sedate and her health is good for her age. The male was from a "farm litter" and although he is now 99% "domesticated," occasionally one can observe that truly "wild" instinct in his general behavior.

Since the male enjoys chewing on my wife's house plants, I had started taking him out in the yard on occasion to eat grass or catmint. He had begun to spray, and we suspected that was due to noticing other cats' scent outside. We discontinued taking him outside.

Unfortunately, he did not cease his spraying habits, and we soon began using the usual products - Nature's Miracle and Feliway - as well as the carpet shampooer.

Here's where it gets strange...

The Feliway seemed to severely reduce his spraying, but for some reason, he has added peeing around the house to his bad habits!:confused3

We have 2 litterboxes filled with PLAIN litter and we scoop them daily and change the litter regularly.

There seems to be no pattern to the male's peeing - he does it in the middle of the room or on a throw rug in another room. NOTE: we have not observed him "dripping."

He will be going to the vet this week, just to verify whether or not it's a urinary problem. We don't think it is.

People, we're running out of options and ideas here!

Any and all suggestions are welcome.

Regards,

Foxnaturist

The first thing you do is take your cat to the vet. Cats are fasidious creatures and they do not pee outside of the box unless there is a problem, be in medical, or behavioral. They can do if they are stressed out, if there are to many cats in their territory, as it is a marking method for them. They will return to their place of pee about every three days to refresh it.

You may not have a clean enough litter pan, you may not have enough litter pans,(try using four) you may have switched litter. You can buy some extra pans and different kinds of litter and set these out in different private areas of the house, and see where he prefers to go.

You can set food bowls on the stains, most cats will not urinate where they eat.

You can use Scope mouthwash to get up the stains, but you really need an enzyme remover. If you are cleaning the stains up with anything that has ammonia in it, don't do that. You should invest in a black light and use that to find all the urine stains, and again, unless you use a really good enzyme remover, cleaning the urine won't be very effective.

Good luck! I hope your kitty does not have a UTI.

Please click on this link for lots of great ideas on stopping inappropriate urination.

http://www.thecatsite.com/forums/sho...&threadid=9563

Try growing some cat grass. Put the seeds in a heavy ceramic pot so that he can pull on the grass without making a mess.

Also, spray Bitter Apple on the plants you do not want him to eat. I think that you will find the cat grass to be a real help.

I'm glad you are taking him to the vet. Let us know what the vet says.

My thanks to the CatSite members that have responded thus far.

As I said, the male cat (Precious) will be visiting the vet.

We have had male cats in past years who developed uti's and we're familiar with those symptoms.

Also note: Precious DOES poop in the litter box and he does pee some there also; it's just that he's taken to whizzing around the house of late.

And (in case anyone asks) we feed our cats the best food to minimize those kinds of problems.

I'll keep you all posted...

Foxnaturist