Hi, do any of you have ideas on what I can do with my senile old cat who is now pooping outside his litter box? He just started doing this about a three weeks ago, and I am concerned he's just getting more senile. We have an appointment with the vet in a few days, but in the mean time I wanted to get some feedback from the experts
Some details on our situation:
- 16 year old cat, whom the vet thinks has feline dementia as of about 6 months ago
- only cat in the house for the last year
- HUGE litter box, which used to be used by four cats - now he's the only one (as of a year ago)
- litter box is literally 4 feet long and 1.5 feet wide - it's actually an under-bed storage box which we re-purposed when we had 4 cats
- litter is cleaned mostly every morning, but sometimes every other day if we're busy (we have a 1.5 year old) and never left more than 2 days (very rare, we don't get out much LOL)
- no peeing issues, and not all poop is outside the box. Maybe 2 days out of 7 he is pooping outside the box
- pooping outside the box seems to have no correlation to what we're doing - doesn't matter if we're home or not, if we have people over, if we're in the basement... I can't think of anything which might be stressing him out on the days he chooses the floor over the box
- no visible issues with the poop - it's soft and he's not constipated, no blood, no yowling when he's going, no difference in poop when he goes in the box or outside of it
- the litter box is in a cubby hole under the stairs, where it has been the whole 7 years we have lived here. It's a 4ft x 8ft room with a door which is only used for the littler. Nothing else is in the room and no changes to the room since we moved in
- it's on the basement level of our house, which is also where he poops incorrectly - in the room adjacent to the littler room
- not a lot of traffic on that floor, just laundry - that floor is not baby-proof so we don't spend any social time down there so he's got a lot of privacy
After reading other posts I will get some Feliway and spray that in the room he's incorrectly pooping in... but I wanted to see if anyone else on this forum also had issues with a cat with dementia and whether they were able to solve this problem. I am really hoping there is something else which we could attribute this behaviour to, since if the answer is that he's going crazier then I don't know what we can do to solve the problem....
Oh, and with the dementia, he yowls in the middle of the night (every night), he gets day & night mixed up, he thinks he's alone in the house when we're here (I can tell this because he gets the rips and runs into the room we're in and has this hilarious surprised look on his face when he sees us LOL). But he is very gentle with our daughter and we love him. We would love to find a solution to this pooping problem as my husband is at his wit's end with this and we're now talking about "other options" if it gets worse
Please help!! Thanks
Some details on our situation:
- 16 year old cat, whom the vet thinks has feline dementia as of about 6 months ago
- only cat in the house for the last year
- HUGE litter box, which used to be used by four cats - now he's the only one (as of a year ago)
- litter box is literally 4 feet long and 1.5 feet wide - it's actually an under-bed storage box which we re-purposed when we had 4 cats
- litter is cleaned mostly every morning, but sometimes every other day if we're busy (we have a 1.5 year old) and never left more than 2 days (very rare, we don't get out much LOL)
- no peeing issues, and not all poop is outside the box. Maybe 2 days out of 7 he is pooping outside the box
- pooping outside the box seems to have no correlation to what we're doing - doesn't matter if we're home or not, if we have people over, if we're in the basement... I can't think of anything which might be stressing him out on the days he chooses the floor over the box
- no visible issues with the poop - it's soft and he's not constipated, no blood, no yowling when he's going, no difference in poop when he goes in the box or outside of it
- the litter box is in a cubby hole under the stairs, where it has been the whole 7 years we have lived here. It's a 4ft x 8ft room with a door which is only used for the littler. Nothing else is in the room and no changes to the room since we moved in
- it's on the basement level of our house, which is also where he poops incorrectly - in the room adjacent to the littler room
- not a lot of traffic on that floor, just laundry - that floor is not baby-proof so we don't spend any social time down there so he's got a lot of privacy
After reading other posts I will get some Feliway and spray that in the room he's incorrectly pooping in... but I wanted to see if anyone else on this forum also had issues with a cat with dementia and whether they were able to solve this problem. I am really hoping there is something else which we could attribute this behaviour to, since if the answer is that he's going crazier then I don't know what we can do to solve the problem....
Oh, and with the dementia, he yowls in the middle of the night (every night), he gets day & night mixed up, he thinks he's alone in the house when we're here (I can tell this because he gets the rips and runs into the room we're in and has this hilarious surprised look on his face when he sees us LOL). But he is very gentle with our daughter and we love him. We would love to find a solution to this pooping problem as my husband is at his wit's end with this and we're now talking about "other options" if it gets worse
Please help!! Thanks
