Hi, just joined, and I have an issue I’m hoping someone here can solve. I’m going to provide a wealth of detail and information that may or may not be relevant.
I have a 1.5-year-old, fixed female cat. She was feral as a kitten for her first 6 weeks or so before I adopted her, and she’s still very shy around new or unfamiliar people (interestingly, she warms up to dogs and other cats pretty quickly). She’s the first cat I’ve ever personally adopted. She’s litter box trained and took to it pretty easily. She shares the house with two dogs (belonging to my roommate) with whom she gets along fine; she’s known them since she was a kitten, plays with them, and is otherwise very comfortable with them. She spends time in the living room and elsewhere in the house, but my room is her space; it’s where I feed her and where she sleeps at night, and I keep the door closed to keep the dogs out of my trash and her food. She has access to one litter box in my room and two in the living room, so no matter where she is, she has a place to go. Through my process of learning how best to care for her, there were some hiccups along the way where she’d urinate outside the litter boxes, but in most every case, I’ve figured out it was something I’d done wrong that led to the incident and adjusted accordingly.
Now, the problem: she recently picked up the habit of urinating in the dogs’ kennel — in particular, on the dogs’ nylon mat. She returns to the same spot every time, despite us treating the urine spots with a vinegar solution and spraying the mat down thoroughly.
In a previous situation when she kept urinating in a laundry hamper, I scolded her to no avail and eventually resorting to a “reset” — isolating her in my room for several weeks — which, combined with the scolding, an additional living room litter box, and some praise and treat reinforcement for using the litter box, seemed to break the habit.
But several weeks ago, she started this new habit. At first, I thought I’d just fallen behind on litter box maintenance, but having that straightened out didn’t help. A two-week reset seemed to go well, but she went right back to the mat three days later.
While a third roommate did recently move in — bringing a third dog and a cat, all largely confined to the new roommate’s room — the mat habit started before the move-in, so even if it’s exacerbated the issue, it couldn’t have been the initial cause.
Regardless, I’m trying to find a solution that doesn’t involve replacing or moving the dogs’ kennel and/or mat, as that would require an excessive amount of rearranging in the entire living room. I’ve looked into scent deterrents, but it seems that the vast majority of scents that would deter my cat — whether natural or specialized store-bought sprays — would also be undesirable to the dogs. The same goes for most any deterrent I’ve thought up or read about so far. Has anyone had a similar problem? How would y’all solve it?
I have a 1.5-year-old, fixed female cat. She was feral as a kitten for her first 6 weeks or so before I adopted her, and she’s still very shy around new or unfamiliar people (interestingly, she warms up to dogs and other cats pretty quickly). She’s the first cat I’ve ever personally adopted. She’s litter box trained and took to it pretty easily. She shares the house with two dogs (belonging to my roommate) with whom she gets along fine; she’s known them since she was a kitten, plays with them, and is otherwise very comfortable with them. She spends time in the living room and elsewhere in the house, but my room is her space; it’s where I feed her and where she sleeps at night, and I keep the door closed to keep the dogs out of my trash and her food. She has access to one litter box in my room and two in the living room, so no matter where she is, she has a place to go. Through my process of learning how best to care for her, there were some hiccups along the way where she’d urinate outside the litter boxes, but in most every case, I’ve figured out it was something I’d done wrong that led to the incident and adjusted accordingly.
Now, the problem: she recently picked up the habit of urinating in the dogs’ kennel — in particular, on the dogs’ nylon mat. She returns to the same spot every time, despite us treating the urine spots with a vinegar solution and spraying the mat down thoroughly.
In a previous situation when she kept urinating in a laundry hamper, I scolded her to no avail and eventually resorting to a “reset” — isolating her in my room for several weeks — which, combined with the scolding, an additional living room litter box, and some praise and treat reinforcement for using the litter box, seemed to break the habit.
But several weeks ago, she started this new habit. At first, I thought I’d just fallen behind on litter box maintenance, but having that straightened out didn’t help. A two-week reset seemed to go well, but she went right back to the mat three days later.
While a third roommate did recently move in — bringing a third dog and a cat, all largely confined to the new roommate’s room — the mat habit started before the move-in, so even if it’s exacerbated the issue, it couldn’t have been the initial cause.
Regardless, I’m trying to find a solution that doesn’t involve replacing or moving the dogs’ kennel and/or mat, as that would require an excessive amount of rearranging in the entire living room. I’ve looked into scent deterrents, but it seems that the vast majority of scents that would deter my cat — whether natural or specialized store-bought sprays — would also be undesirable to the dogs. The same goes for most any deterrent I’ve thought up or read about so far. Has anyone had a similar problem? How would y’all solve it?
