Food/pee/poop ?

Hello,

What a way to introduce myself here! I have just found this forum & am so thrilled to have done so. I have had cats my entire life. I was raised on a farm so the cats always got dry food. I now feed mine Purina One now after dabbling with Science Diet & some other vet recommended food, but am looking for something good as their waste stinks to high heaven.

So I currently have two yellow boys-one huge & one small!! The huge one is overweight-I found him as a kitten at a farm show & took him home when no one claimed him. He was the size of a 6 week old, but the vet aged him at 3 months. To make a long story short, he has made sure that he will never be starved again & has tremendous food issues. I tried to diet him once & after I tripped on him a dozen times one day, I decided this was a losing battle. My rationale-he's a cat & doesn't understand being fat can lead to a shorter life span/health problems!! I'd rather him be fat & happy, than miserable. That being said, we have given him light food & experimented with food without much success. Moving to cat 2, he's a normal eater, but did have the urinary blockage requiring surgery at age 3 & has refused to pee in the litter box ever since. (He's now 7 & the fat one is 6) He finds towels on the floor or paper to pee on. As we have a 4 year old, something is always somewhere on our floor unless we have company , so he usually finds somewhere to pee. So now you know both of our problems so to speak.

Here are my questions: I really have not had much luck with 'good' food in regards to controlling poop odor & my fat boy wanting to eat less. So any food recommendations with urinary considerations in mind would be greatly appreciated. I just renovated my house slightly & moved my computer desk/station right by the litter box, so the odor is killing me. I also work online, so I'm here quite often & of course my babies always seem to need to go when I'm working! So any good smell food recommendations would make me forever grateful!

Finally, any suggestions on my pisser boy would be appreciated as well. My DH threatens his life at least bimonthly (Max cuddles & plays with him at night to stay alive I think)!! So any ideas for him would be great,too! Have a great weekend everyone & thanks in advance for all the great advice you all might have!

For me Kirkland and Natural choice have the best odur control... VMMV ... but for most cat NO grd corn and no more than one to two grains = less stink as they digest it more ... For me grain frees did NOT control odur as well VMMV ...what do you use for litter??

Welcome to TCS

I use just plain old cheap litter added to the new tidy cat disposable trays. BTW-what is VMMV? Sorry, I haven't been on many pet sites!

Originally Posted by counttopula

BTW-what is VMMV?

Click to expand...

Hmm, YMMV is "your mileage may vary" (meaning you might not get the same results), but I've never seen VMMV. Typo?

My cats were pretty stinky when I had them on Purina ONE, too. I have them on Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul (yeah, silly name, but a good food) now and the odor is much better. Diamond Naturals or Kirkland (Costco brand) are OK and a lot cheaper. Of course you won't know how a food affects YOUR cats until you try it.

As far as I know, the Tidy cats disposable litterboxes aren't very large. It might be that the box isn't big enough for him, or he may not like the litter. Any particular reason you use the dispoables? How often are the boxes cleaned? You should have at least 2 litterboxes, 3 would be better. And they should be scooped at least once daily.

yup typo....

Thanks for the suggestions. The pee issues have nothing to do with clean pans-he poops in pans. He just has never peed in a pan since his urinary blockage surgery. I use disposable because I'm lazy & hate to scoop. If I add litter to it, then I can use them for a couple of days, but usually with two cats, we go through one a day. My hubby likes them because they come with nonscoopable litter and he read that the scoopable was actually bad for cats. So, convenience combined with that makes for a good reason to spend a bit more. I actually really like them, though, and my cats have no issues using them even though they're a bit flimsy & smaller, but they're not that much smaller than a regular pan. Thanks again!

Are you able to confine him to that room for a week or so, with nothing on the floor for him to pee on, and see what happens? I have heard of sooo many cats, even without medical problems, peeing on towels, clothes, backpacks, etc. left on the floor. My female does it if I leave a bed or blanket on the hardwood floor for the dogs to lay on

We have tried that & I know that it works, but he 'knocks' on the door by banging it with his paw underneath. It sounds just like someone at the front door! Anyway, it's not exactly restful at night. The room we have used is our bathroom or the hall bathroom which are close to all bedrooms. Our basement is finished short of one room & it does not have a clear floor-lots of totes/boxes stored in there & we don't allow them access at all there just because I'm afraid they might get into something dangerous. So the rest of our house is very open, leaving me not a lot of options for this. My DH suggested a kennel, but I think he would cry causing sleeping issues as much as the locked room!!

I'm curious, though, do cats ever stop doing this? We've read at other sites online that this is a behavior that is very hard to break once started.