Inappropriate Elimination-different case

I'm new to this board and from what I can tell there are many, many questions re: eliminating outside the box. I don't want to post a question that someone else has posted, but I haven't seen this particular situation.

First of all, I've lived with many cats my entire life. My husband and I currently have 3 (5 yr old rescue, 3 yr old rescue, 12 wk old rescue - we put to sleep our senior-special-needs rescue recently). I've dealt with inapp elimination due to health issues (asthma, prednisone side effects, UTI), behavioral issues, etc. I've never had a kitten have so many litterbox problems though...

We've had our 12 wk old cat for a little over 2 weeks and we're already having litterbox problems.

Here's the current set-up in our 3000SF house:

LitterMate Mega in upstairs office with wheat litter.

One regular pan in upstairs hallway.

One regular pan downstairs.

Two regular pans have Cat Attract litter.

All 3 pans are in quiet places, not hard to get to. We have a pan for each cat. I clean each pan 2x/day (sometimes more) and I sweep around each pan 2x/day. We have Feliway plug-ins throughout the house.

The kitten, Maggie, seems very well adjusted, very independent and she has seen my vet and is UTD on shots. She was also spayed by the rescue org we adopted her from.

One of the first nights we had her home she defecated in our closet. I decided she was just too small to make it to the litterbox so I moved the one in the upstairs hallway to right outside our bedroom door. This past weekend she urinated and defecated on our bath mat (it was much further for her to get to our BR than to get to the pan). She also defecated downstairs in the corner of a room.

Things were looking up (we added the Cat Attract litter this weekend and we began taking her to the pan w/i minutes of eating). Yesterday am she urinated on bathmat again (it had been soaked in Nature's Miracle for cats and washed following the initial incident). So we decided she just couldn't sleep in our room. Last night she came in for playtime before we went to sleep. I was lying there reading, Maggie and my dog were playing on the bed, next thing I knew I looked down and Maggie had urinated on the bed.

I'm at a loss and my vet is out of town. I have never had a kitten have so many "accidents". Help???

At 12 weeks she is still a little baby. Chances are that it is just too difficult to climb into the litter box, so simply squatting on the rug is the easiest thing for her to do. Until she grows a bit larger, you might want to use a lid to a large storage container (about 1" sides) or a cake pan or something else with low edges as a litter box. Once she can easily step into a regular litter box (where it takes no effort at all) you can get rid of the baby box.

Regarding the bath mat. I don't know why, but some cats are attracted to the rubber backing. We had to get rid of all traditional rubber-backed bath mats in our house, and now have cloth throw rugs in the bathrooms instead because we have one cat who just has to pee on the rubber-backed bath mats. Once we got rid of the rubber-backed mats (even though we have other rugs in the exact same places) she has never peed inappropriately again! (Of course we first ruled out health problems, because urinary tract infections/blockages are a common cause of potty problems.)

I can tell you why . Next time you're in a store pick up a brand new rubber backed bath mat and stick your nose up next to the rubber. Latex rubber smells just like cat pee!

Originally Posted by RoseHawke

I can tell you why

. Next time you're in a store pick up a brand new rubber backed bath mat and stick your nose up next to the rubber. Latex rubber smells just like cat pee!

Click to expand...

(but don't let anyone see you sniffing it )