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- Aug 19, 2013
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We've been having some litterbox issues for quite a while now. Probably over a year. We have two cats. One, a male, is 6. He was our first cat. Then two years later we brought home our female cat (a kitten at the time), who is 4 now. When we decided to get a second cat I did a little research and saw that it is best to have a litter box for each cat, to prevent territorial disputes. So we did that right away. This worked well for years. However one week we were really busy and didn't clean the litter boxes as much as we should have. This was the beginning of our problems. Our female cat started to pee on the carpet just outside of the litterbox. We quickly scolded ourselves for letting the boxes get so bad and cleaned the mess but since the urine smell was so hard to get up she continued to do this even when the boxes were clean. We then closed off that room until we could recarpet (it wasn't very nice carpet anyways) and moved the litter boxes. This seemed to do the trick. However eventually she started getting picky about how dirty the boxes could be before she decided to pee outside of them again. At this time I'd say we were cleaning every 3 days or so. We had never had picky cats like this so that seemed pretty good to us at the time. Again I cleaned the carpet as best as I could but this time we laid down puppy pads in front of the boxes, since we have a small house and not enough room to keep moving litter boxes around in. At this time we told ourselves that we really just had to buckle down and fix our own issue of not cleaning the boxes enough. I think one of the issues my girl cat has is the fact that our male cat is the alpha and doesn't bother covering up his business. Plus he will do this is both litterboxes. So we cleaned them every two days. And we were pretty good at remembering to do this. Bad habits are hard to change so it did take us a while and each time we let it go longer than 2 days she would pee on the puppy pad to remind us the boxes were not clean enough. The funny thing is it is only ever one pee on the puppy pad. She will do that one reminder pee and then keep using the litterbox. She never poops outside of the litterbox, no matter if she's dissatisfied with it's state or not.
We now clean the boxes everyday, making sure to add a bit of new litter each time to freshen it up. The discouraging thing is this morning I woke up to a pee on the puppy pad, when my husband cleaned out the boxes last night before bed. I checked the boxes and there is only one poop in the one litter box. The other one, the one she uses most, is empty. At this point I don't know what to do.
Perhaps the litter is too old? How often should we completely dump and wash the boxes? We can't afford to do this everyday! Is she perhaps telling us that she doesn't want to share litter boxes with our other cat anymore? I don't know how to rectify this without giving her to a new home. I would hate to do this since she is really a sweet cat and not dirty at all... in fact the problem we seem to be having is her extreme cleanliness.
What do you recommend?
We now clean the boxes everyday, making sure to add a bit of new litter each time to freshen it up. The discouraging thing is this morning I woke up to a pee on the puppy pad, when my husband cleaned out the boxes last night before bed. I checked the boxes and there is only one poop in the one litter box. The other one, the one she uses most, is empty. At this point I don't know what to do.
Perhaps the litter is too old? How often should we completely dump and wash the boxes? We can't afford to do this everyday! Is she perhaps telling us that she doesn't want to share litter boxes with our other cat anymore? I don't know how to rectify this without giving her to a new home. I would hate to do this since she is really a sweet cat and not dirty at all... in fact the problem we seem to be having is her extreme cleanliness.
What do you recommend?