- Joined
- Oct 23, 2013
- Messages
- 2
- Purraise
- 10
Hello everyone and thanks for taking a moment to help.
My wife and I are dog people who have three cats because we can't always be home to let a dog out. My 15 year old daughter really needs animals around, so it was a cat or nothing. Our cats are 100% housecats and never let outside.
We got the first cat (socks) but we were new to the whole cat thing. He was a barn kitten and we didn't know to get him fixed before he started spraying. We quickly got him fixed, but we're 99% sure he's never stopped spraying.
When he was about a year old he got out of the house for one day. We brought him back in and cleaned him up, but a few weeks later we noticed him acting frightened/anxious often. At this point we (seriously) think he has PTSD.
When Socks was about 15 months old, we took in two brother kittens, Loki and Thor. Socks's anxiety only got worse, and he jumps at almost any sudden sound. He runs in fear from plastic bags which he didn't do for the first year or so. We think it's the older cat spraying, but all three have been caught doing it at one time or another. The two new cats were fixed before they began spraying on their own, but the (suspected) spraying from the older cat might be confusing them.
The spraying has never stopped and to date we've spent hundreds of $$ on new couches. We've had seven couches and just threw out two peed-on chairs. All the spraying/peeing is in the living room on soft couches/chairs unless we leave a pile of laundry somewhere.
We have increased the number of litter boxes (there are now four, in two different places. We have a three-level house (basement, ground floor and bedroom floor), but we have no place to keep a litter box on the ground floor - there simply isn't space and believe me we've wracked our brains about it! So two are upstairs in the linen closet and two are in the basement in the washroom. They don't use the basement ones very often unless I'm down there doing laundry.
So I've tried to anticipate any question you kind folks might ask me; here are my questions.
1) Is there anything else I can do to stop the spraying? We've been on websites and watched videos several times, and the problem persists.
2) Can anyone recommend waterproof couch and chair covers that are ACTUALLY waterproof and ACTUALLY machine washable and NOT clear plastic? Everything online I'm finding is either just plastic - which is ugly and noisy, but that's what we're dealing with now - or it's cloth and not actually waterproof.
Thank you so much for any suggestions you may have!
Matt -
My wife and I are dog people who have three cats because we can't always be home to let a dog out. My 15 year old daughter really needs animals around, so it was a cat or nothing. Our cats are 100% housecats and never let outside.
We got the first cat (socks) but we were new to the whole cat thing. He was a barn kitten and we didn't know to get him fixed before he started spraying. We quickly got him fixed, but we're 99% sure he's never stopped spraying.
When he was about a year old he got out of the house for one day. We brought him back in and cleaned him up, but a few weeks later we noticed him acting frightened/anxious often. At this point we (seriously) think he has PTSD.
When Socks was about 15 months old, we took in two brother kittens, Loki and Thor. Socks's anxiety only got worse, and he jumps at almost any sudden sound. He runs in fear from plastic bags which he didn't do for the first year or so. We think it's the older cat spraying, but all three have been caught doing it at one time or another. The two new cats were fixed before they began spraying on their own, but the (suspected) spraying from the older cat might be confusing them.
The spraying has never stopped and to date we've spent hundreds of $$ on new couches. We've had seven couches and just threw out two peed-on chairs. All the spraying/peeing is in the living room on soft couches/chairs unless we leave a pile of laundry somewhere.
We have increased the number of litter boxes (there are now four, in two different places. We have a three-level house (basement, ground floor and bedroom floor), but we have no place to keep a litter box on the ground floor - there simply isn't space and believe me we've wracked our brains about it! So two are upstairs in the linen closet and two are in the basement in the washroom. They don't use the basement ones very often unless I'm down there doing laundry.
So I've tried to anticipate any question you kind folks might ask me; here are my questions.
1) Is there anything else I can do to stop the spraying? We've been on websites and watched videos several times, and the problem persists.
2) Can anyone recommend waterproof couch and chair covers that are ACTUALLY waterproof and ACTUALLY machine washable and NOT clear plastic? Everything online I'm finding is either just plastic - which is ugly and noisy, but that's what we're dealing with now - or it's cloth and not actually waterproof.
Thank you so much for any suggestions you may have!
Matt -
