Its never good when you’re tired and slipping into bed, stretching out your legs, and then you hit the cold wet spot left by a pool of cat urine. Its especially not good when the cat seems to be targeting you, but that is what Baby seems to be doing to Sarah. Having Dinah in the house must be ticking off Baby as he’s getting way less attention. To show his displeasure he’s will target Sarah’s side of the bed for a full-on bladder dump. Its never my side of the bed, its always Sarah’s. We think it might be the recent addition of baby gates to the house that ticked him off this time, as when we have them closed to keep Dinah in, the gates have the side-effect of keeping Baby out.
For months we’ve just been leaving our bedroom door closed when we’re not in it, to keep Baby from having the chance. Yesterday, I left the door open for a five minute window and Baby took his chance. Of course, we didn’t discover it until about 10:30 at night when we were going to bed, and by then it had soaked all the way down to the mattress.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time. Baby was the perfect cat (at least in regards to waste elimination) until he got a urinary tract infection in Dec. 2002. Now the UTI has become a yearly occurrence, and as a side effect it opened his eyes to the wonders of doing his business in inappropriate places.
Sarah is at wits end and we can’t figure out what to do. We’ve tried all sorts of techniques to stop him from peeing in all the wrong places, but there is always a point where we get complacent and forget to put the technique in place, or Baby just learns to ignore the deterrent. We’re also concerned because we have an infant crawling around and we’re uncomfortable with the thought that one day Dinah will come across a puddle we hadn’t yet identified.
Our options are starting to become limited and the options we are starting to be left with don’t make me comfortable, especially because of how much Dinah lights up when Baby comes into the room. Some of these options would be easier if he was old or infirm, but he’s neither. Its really quite depressing.
Does he only leave messes in the bedroom, or is it elsewhere around the house?
Misty had the same problem (although it wasn’t due to the addition of a baby – it was because of the taunting of outside cats) and when I put her on valium, the problem went away. Only thing is, you can’t put a cat on valium for more than a year.
So now she lives in the basement, where I have my office, and since I work from home at least once (if not 2 or 5 times) a week, she gets attention from me for several hours a day and this seems to work well for all of us.
Its our bed and the bed in the second bedroom. However, I don’t think we’ve ever really been able to get the urine smell out of the futon mattress, so I don’t know if the second bedroom counts. But yeah, generally no where else in the house.
I don’t know how to help you, but I can certainly sympathize – my parents’ cats managed to destroy hardwood floors by peering in the corner all the time, no matter what they did. the floor is all black and nasty now, and the room kinda smells.
there’s always the approach of just locking the cat out of all the inappropriate places he might pee?
The problem that Mr. Garner has here is that he has a cat. He really should look in to finding alternate living conditions for the beast and buy a dog instead. They know the bathroom is outside. They actually feel sorry if they have accidents in the house. To a cat, the whole house is a bathroom.