Everyone's Pissed

September 14, 2006 12:35 PM

Our cats are urinating inappropriately, and seem to be targeting our kid. Can the situation be salvaged?

We have two indoor-only cats that predate our kid by about a year. Until this point, kid and cats have coexisted peacefully: he doesn't torture them, and they seem to actually enjoy his presence.

However, for the past several months, one or both cats have been increasingly urinating inappropriately on his changing pad, the laundry in his room, and the twin bed in his room. If his clothes are in a load of our laundry, they've occasionally targeted the entire load of our stuff.

We have no idea which cat is the problem.

Both cats have been examined by a veterinarian, and there is no health-related reason for this. It certainly seems like they're targeting him. We're changing the litterboxes twice a day. We're giving the cats plenty of attention.

We're at our wits' end. We very much do not want to have to choose between the cats and the kid, because that's not a choice at all, but we can't live like this, washing every load three times and basically reconfiguring our entire lives around unpredictable feline behavior.

Has anyone successfully solved this problem? If you have, how?

posted by scrump to pets & animals (11 comments total)

Have you heard of this product?

I haven't used it but have heard good things.
posted by agregoli at 12:41 PM on September 14, 2006

Closed lid hampers.

Our cats did the same thing with our son - it seems to be a combination of being jelous, and wanting to mark the kid as thier own.

We finally had to purchase closed lid hampers (and not wicker, that does nothing but filter the urine) and put all his clothes into it. The behavior all but stopped about 2mo after doing this, however once in a while they do it again - normally when we have been away, and they always target him (he's 3 now).
posted by niteHawk at 12:41 PM on September 14, 2006

Shut the door and keep them out of his room. Don't take his laundry out of his room until you're ready to put it in the washing machine.
posted by oaf at 12:43 PM on September 14, 2006

oaf has a good point - if you can keep them out of his room and away from your kid's clothes, then it seems they won't be able to "target" those things.
posted by agregoli at 12:48 PM on September 14, 2006

Are they targeting items that smell of his urine? You mentioned his changing pad, his clothes and his bed. I am wondering if they smell his urine on these places, and confuse them with the litter tray?
posted by Joh at 12:53 PM on September 14, 2006

oaf has a good point - if you can keep them out of his room and away from your kid's clothes, then it seems they won't be able to "target" those things.

Yeah, whenever my girlfriend goes home, her mom has to keep her door shut for a week beforehand, and the entire time she's there, or within two minutes of her arrival, one of her cats will pee on her bed.
posted by oaf at 1:00 PM on September 14, 2006

One of our cats was targeting a rug in our living room for some reason and we tried Feliway, the product agregoli linked to, to get him to stop (in conjunction with the other things you mentioned: vet visit, changing the litter box more frequently, etc.). We used both the plug-in disperser and the spray directly on the rug he still kept going on the rug. Finally we just got rid of the rug and got one that was lower pile and he hasn't peed on it since.

So my advice to you: get rid of your kid.
posted by sbrollins at 1:51 PM on September 14, 2006

One of our two indoor cats had a nasty habit of peeing on our bed. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with our overly excited dogs wanting to play with him, but I can't tell for sure. Anywho, we put the offending cat on kitty prozac and he has stopped turning our bed into a field of delicious ammonia. The prozac is quite cheap and we actually gave him only half a pill a night, instead of the requisite full pill every night. After two or three months of the prozac, we took him off of it and he hasn't peed on the bed since then. I'm not sure how long it's been since he's been off the prozac, but it has been a long time.
posted by NoMich at 2:20 PM on September 14, 2006

I await biscotti...

In the mean time...kitties love structure and predictability in their environment, and Baby is more than likely starting to shift the equation in the direction of chaos-- is Baby getting older and making more noise/crawling around?

Use the Feliway plug in, keep Baby's clothes out of the reach of kitties, and buy a new changing pad if you can. They are probably marking because of jealousy and ownership, as mentioned upthread, but they also respond to spots they have peed on before-- they can smell it long after we can. Anti-Icky Poo is a great product, if not a bit pricey, but it does take the urine stink out of everything.

Another option is to have something that smells like Baby (not Baby pee), say a towel, and put that towel in with the things kitties like to sleep on. Making a group scent with kitties and Baby will go a ways in making kitties feel like baby is an acceptable part f the environment. They might try to pee on it, but put it in a favorite sleeping spot for kitties, and they are less likely to urinate on it.

We had a kitty eliminating improperly because of hierarchy issues with the other kitties. We had to crate her for about 6 weeks to retrain her to the box, let the areas we cleaned repeatedly de-scent, and equalize the dynamic in the house. That is a serious last-resort option. The crate was a Great Dane crate with a litter box and toys and a 2-tier kitty condo in it, not a tiny cage, and it ran us about 100 bucks. It worked, though.
posted by oflinkey at 7:37 PM on September 14, 2006

I second Feliway. Just keep spraying everything (including your kid) with it everyday for a couple weeks. The cats will stop eventually.

Can you think of anything the cats might be stressed out about? Cats need routine or they get stressed.

In any case, inappropriate urination is a totally solvable problem, you just have to be patient and willing to try a few things.

A good book for soliving difficult cat problems is Think Like a Cat by Pam Johnson-Bennett.
posted by Jess the Mess at 11:48 AM on September 15, 2006

When I had a problem with a cat peeing in front of the box, I set up a webcam on a laptop with some free motion detecting surveillance software to catch the culprit in the act.
posted by Caviar at 3:27 PM on September 19, 2006