Diluted pee?

[Anoxia]

Hello! I've been finding random puddles that I suspect may be pee. I'm in the process of setting up a pet cam to find out which cat is doing it so I can take them to the vet for a urinalysis and bloodwork (currently I just set my phone on record while I wait for delivery of the pet cam, but no luck yet), but I would appreciate feedback while waiting.


In chronological order:

• A month or so ago I found a puddle in the litter mat in front of their litter box. I'm not sure how old it was because it was on the lower layer so I didn't find it for some time until it began to smell, and because it smelled like coffee/toffee I thought someone may have spilled their drink on it and didn't think much of it.
• Last night when I came home from work around 8:00 PM I found a puddle on the same spot. It had a very faint odor and may have been slightly sweet?
• At 9:04 PM I returned to the room to find a puddle of liquid next to my chair (I was gone for under 20 minutes). It was pooled (e.g. circular shape, with no direction or splash damage) and had a deep yellow color but had almost no odor; if I had to describe it, I would say it was closer to the smell of dog pee than cat pee, but I had to almost press the paper towel to my nose to be able to catch the smell. I sprayed both the mat and the floor by the chair with Nature's Miracle Enzymatic Formula (NM).
• At 12:40 AM, I found another puddle in the same spot by my chair. It had no color and no odor and was in the shape of a puddle. I suspect it may have been done while I was brushing my teeth (or very stealthily, as I had been sitting in my seat since I cleaned up at 9:04 without moving before I went to the bathroom), so I would have been gone for around 10 minutes.
• I doused both the mat and the floor next to my chair with NM and went to sleep.
• When I woke up around 9:21 AM, I found two more puddles by my chair. One was oblong and the edges were smooth (e.g. no indication it went from one direction to another, or any splash damage). The second was smaller and had almost fully evaporated by the time I was awake; this is the only one where there was no puddle. There was a very faint yellow or brownish tinge to the paper towels when I cleaned them up, and there was no odor except for what remained of the NM.

Notes:

• There have been no major changes to food, etc. However: yesterday my roommate did host a small birthday party (only 2 additional guests as she is keeping to her COVID bubble), but it is not the first time we have had visitors for a celebration and none of the cats reacted negatively either in the past or last night (e.g. no hiding). As of this week I have been spending an additional 18 hours at work (6 hours every other day) as our WFH time is being cut.
• They get water through their food and they don't appear to have an increased thirst drive. (I joke that it's a waste of time for me to clean and refill their water bowl every morning because no one ever drinks from it. Their last annual check-up was two to three weeks ago and the vet was fine with the water they got through their food and it did not seem to be an issue that they did not drink from water bowls.)
• They do not have dry food at all in their diet; it is only wet food or raw.
• I found a normal amount of cat pee in the litter boxes, and none of my cats have modified behaviors.
• They are roughly 2.5 years old.

Thank you so much!

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

Hmmm. Are you absolutely certain this is urine? Could it be an over acidic stomach throw-up instead? Just wondering since the amount of clumps in the box is the same and you aren't noticing them drinking any more than usual. Plus it doesn't smell like urine but something else.

If all those things hadn't been mentioned, I would say you need to isolate them to figure out which cat it is and then take them in, but now I'm jut not sure. I guess you need to get that camera set up to figure this out. How many cats are we talking about here?

 

[Anoxia]

Content-wise it might be throw-up, it was just so strange because their throw-up usually has a distinct splatter-shape and sometimes foaming/bubbles or chunks of food, but these puddles had smooth edges, were round or oval, and seemed to be just liquid with no other texture. Because the girls don't drink water, their liquid intake tends to be the same color as their food (so a milky opaque yellow from the supplements to a pale pink from the meat; they don't eat anything with the same transparent deep yellow color as one of the puddles I found. A friend indicated her cat got olive oil-colored throw-up from too much cat grass, but my girls have only been eating their food the past few weeks). It didn't seem sticky enough to be drool.

Thankfully it's all been in the same area (the litter mat is next to my computer chair) so if the trend continues it should be easy to catch it on camera, I was just so surprised because, as you mentioned, it didn't quite seem to be pee, but it didn't quite seem to be throw-up either.

I have 2 cats, and there are 5 times a day where I'll scoop their litter boxes if anything is in there since I last checked.

Thank you so much for your thoughts!