my cat likes to poop outside her litter box!

My cat (We love her to death) likes to poop outside her litter box every now and then. Sometimes it is once a week or once a month or maybe once in 3 months. Her litter box is always clean. After she does her poop, she would meow furiously to let us know and usually is somewhere on a rug that we can't miss. Then the next day she goes back to her litter box. We tried to watch what makes her behave that way but there is no consistent tell tail sign that we can put our fingers on.

Please give me some suggestions on why my cat behaves like that and what I can do to eliminate her behavor.

Thanks
confused:

how clean is 'clean'? How many cats do you have and how many litterboxes? How many times a day do you scoop? Is it covered/uncovered? Does she fit in it?

I'm a pet sitter and I once cared for a cat who would also do that. His case was pretty rare, but I'll pass it on just in case. He had exceptionally dry stool and defecation was painful to him. If cats begin associating pain with the litterbox it's not uncommon for them to go outside. In his case, the addition of canned food to his diet softened the stool and he went right back to his box. The fact that your cat meows and shows you the stool makes me wonder if there might not be something similar going on. You might consider a trip to the vet just to cover the bases. Or, if you think it's behavioral, try putting out a second box in another location and of a different type. Maybe she's just looking for variety!

Thanks... Howtoholdcat. I am beginning to think what you say is true because Mimosa, my cat's stool is very dry and I hear her meowing loudly when she does it on the rug. We had her checked for UTI because of her meowing but that was negative. So I think she is constipating. So I will try giving her some wet food to her diet to soften her stools. Is there any other way to soften her stool just in case she doesn't like canned food? Mimosa is very very picky about her food.

Sakura...I only have one cat. I use Scoop Free litter box that uses crystals and automatically scoops away her stools into a container. I clean that box and change the crystals every week even though the manufacturer recommended that it only needed cleaning every 30 days. So I know Mimosa's litter box is very clean.

Thanks for your replies. Any more suggestions are welcome.

I think adding wet food to her diet may help - but you should also consider adding another litterbox. Even though you have an automatic litter box, there are many picky kitties that really prefer to defecate in one box and urinate in another box. The rule of thumb is "the number of cats you have plus one" for the number of litter boxes that should be in your home.

...and there are so many different types of wet food out there. And because it will be a supplement - like a treat - and not her main source of nutrition, I wouldn't worry too much about whether or not it's high quality. Our kitties hated all the high quality foods. So we feed them a high quality dry food that they free feed on, and we give them Whiska's pouches as a "treat" at "dinner time." (We split one bag of food between three cats, because that's the amount they eat. We used to put out one bag per cat, but they always left so much of it uneaten).

You can also consider getting a drinking fountain if you don't have one. For our cats, it totally changed the amount of water they drink. We tried both the PetMate and the DrinkWell, and because the Drinkwell pours (instead of like the Petmate, where the water just rolls down a chute), it totally drew them to the fountain.

Laurie