She's Driving Me Crazy - Scraping Litter Box

[MonaLyssa33]

Maisie has been driving me crazy. Every morning she wakes me up by scraping her claws against the litter box for at least 30 minutes. I don't want to yell at her or shoo her from the box, but the sound is so irritating! Both boxes get scooped daily, they are both full of litter and I don't know what to do to make her stop. I live in a studio apartment so I can't move the the boxes anywhere else.

 

[rubysmama]

How old is Maisie? Is this after she uses the litter box? Or just her attempt to get your attention?

 

[Columbine]

My girl goes in for box scraping too...its like she's trying REALLY hard to bury her waste, but somehow always manages to miss the litter I just put up with it, but I can see how it could be really frustrating if you're trying to sleep.

It might be worth clipping Maisie's claws to see if that dulls the sound at all. Moving the boxes so they're as far away from your bed as possible might help too. I don't think you can easily stop her doing this, though, as burying waste (or trying to) is such a basic cat instinct.

 

[MonaLyssa33]

How old is Maisie? Is this after she uses the litter box? Or just her attempt to get your attention?

Maisie is maybe 4. I've had her for nearly 3 months and she's just started to trust me, so it's been a longer than usual process.

 

[kobata1928]

My boy Mister will scrape at the side of the box for an annoying amount of time after every use. When he was younger I really wanted to stop the behavior but didn't want to risk any sort of negative emotion about using the box. For months, when I heard him scraping I would gently grab his paw and put it down into the litter. This would work for that use, but next visit to the box he was always back to scraping. With low sided boxes he will actually paw at the air in front of him, but then my other cats dig half the litter box out onto the floor. Sadly, this has become yet another cat behavior I wish wouldn't happen but have given up on changing since it doesn't really hurt anything.

 

[KarenKat]

Gohan is always messing with the litter. Excessive scraping usually means we were bad with cleaning but he often does it in new litter boxes, if I clean or refresh a box, after I scoop, after he or any other cats use it ....

We usually say he likes making kitty sand castles. Sometimes he doesn’t even have to go, he’s just reorginizing. By the end he has all the litter piled in one corner.

 

[MonaLyssa33]

I hopefully think I found the problem. Maisie came from a place where they didn't have covered boxes, so I took the top off one of them to see if that works for her.

 

[Timmer]

My girl Lupita does that. Just like yours, for a very, very, very long time and it's usually in the night and wakes me up. The thing is, she doesn't cover the pee or poop. She just scrapes the sides of the box (there's no lid on it), the desk next to the box and anything else around it. A couple of times I've gotten up in the night and didn't yell, but I said to her "that's enough" and she actually sort of snapped out of it. Like she doesn't even know she's doing it.
The other morning I was clipping her nails and thought she had cat litter stuck to the paw pads so I picked at it and realized she has developed almost like a callous. It's a miracle her paw pads aren't raw.
I'm wondering if it just gives them comfort to do that. So weird.
I'm taking her in for a check up in a couple of weeks and I'm going to talk to the vet about it. I don't know if I will do anything about it but I wanna know what he says.

 

[rubysmama]

Hope removing the cover solves the scratching problem.