Bobbi in Virginia wrote me with her multi-leveled, multi-cat problems, which are a daunting challenge just to think about from afar – I cannot imagine how stressful and challenging they are to actually LIVE with. [NOTE: These are the sort of extreme cat behavior problems I am looking for in the Los Angeles area, to choose a few to whom I am going to make a personal visit!]
My husband and I have emailed you before about the dominance and accompanying pee all over the house issues that we have with our five cats. We have three male tabbies, a calico and a torti. Two males and the calico are litter mates. While we have tried everything you suggested about the pee issues, the truth is that we have just learned to live with them.
At your book’s suggestion, we have switched the cats over to moist food and that has helped litter box issues, but not the peeing.
My question to you today is twofold. First, is it possible for a neutering not to take? Chesapeake who is about five and a half has been wanting to go out in the worst way. We have seen him pee outside the box in front of us and he did it again yesterday. I have taken him to the vet but he is IMPOSSIBLE to medicate! He is too big and too strong for either of us to hold him. She did recommend giving him Cosequin to try and calm him down. I can usually get him to take that on his food.
The second part of the question is that after he peed on a window yesterday, we took him outside and put him in a cat carrier. Since he has been back in the house, he is now the Pariah cat and none of the other cats want to go near him. I am spraying Feliway but that isn’t working very well.
I don’t have to tell you that the whole scenario is very sad not to mention a mess. We constantly have to cover counters and we have had lots of things ruined due to cat pee. Every cat has a box and we have boxes in different places in the house. We even have one under the bed storage box with litter in it. While we suspect that the majority of our issues are from two female cats, now we have this new issue with Chessie.
Jon and I have really appreciated all the helpful advice in The Cat Bible, but now we are asking for any other advice that you may have. Our veterinary care is not the best out here. We have to deal with the doctor that we have due to distance and cost. Thank you in advance for your help!!
Dear Bobbi – First of all, my heart goes out to you for the mess and stress you are living with. Thank you for not giving up on your kitties, but instead trying everything you could and reaching out for help. I am going to do the best I can to point out where I see the greatest problems and what you might do about them. You have already done a few things very well, perhaps with encouragement from THE CAT BIBLE: certainly having the right number of boxes and in different locations, as well as switching to wet food only, are very good basic fixes. But there is so much else going on! This is truly a situation where a vet behaviorist would be so helpful in excluding any physical or medical problems and then unraveling the behavior issues. But you say you are isolated in Virginia and have only one not-so-fabulous vet to turn to. But if you go on my website to look for locations of these vets who belong to AVSAB, maybe there is one nearby. Also, if you are near Blacksburg, where the Virginia Tech vet school is (where I am speaking in the end of April) they might have a behavior department that would help you at little or no cost.
To begin with, your situation has so many layers of confusing information and illogical solutions and assumptions (by you and your vet) that we need to wade through that first. How long have you had five cats? It would seem that at some point things were fine and then you added one or two “cats too many” and that tipped the equilibrium and caused territorial and other issues. You say the females are the problem – how so? What do you say that? Why were you trying to medicate Chessie? And with what? And why would a vet give an arthritis supplement – Cosequin – to calm down a cat? Surely this vet must be smarter than that – or could you have misunderstood? (and by the way, where such supplements are concerned, I vastly prefer Platinum Performance which you can find out all about on my website where I have given them a page – but it has no calming effects, that’s for sure!) But if your vet was literally giving a joint supplement and telling you it would calm your cat, you are going to need to look elsewhere for medical help, that’s for darn sure!
First of all, go to my website and look at the page for Spirit Essences – these are based on the same principles as Bach flower remedies (like “Rescue Remedy”) but formulated just for cats’ emotional issues. You’ll have to look at the description of each essence but I could recommend putting a few drops of “Safe Space” and of “Peacemaker” on top of all the kitties’ food. It will get you onto a calmer plane to make other adjustments, which I am going to recommend. These flower essences are subtle and theoretically take a week or two to show any change, but so far my person use of them and that of other listeners has been pretty quick and a dramatic improvement.
As for Chessie wanting to go out – and now being a victim of the others since you placed him outdoors in a cat carrier (for only a short time, I hope?!) – this is no indication of whether his neutering was successful. He’s not showing any Tomcat behavior anyway – he’s not trying to fight, he’s trying to flee, it sounds like! Since I think what you have is an overcrowding situation, and since Chessie is so eager to be outdoors, I have a suggestion which I think will solve all the issues at once: an outdoors enclosure where Chessie (and perhaps even one or two of his littermates) can live full time or spend most of their time. I really like the product Purrfect Fence (now linked on my website because I am about to make a big push for people enclosing their cats outdoors and never ever letting them run free). This system is simple as pie to put up, nearly invisible to the human eye, not too costly and completely flexible in that you can add it to existing fence, can put it against the side of a garage, shed or the house itself, and it is temporary so if you are renting or plan to move, you can move it as easily as you installed it. If you have access to a big old log you can put it in there for climbing and scratching, you can put a couple of shelves at various levels for Chessie and/or brothers to have that vertical space they crave (which is partly why they are up on your counters) and you can make a little sandbox for a litter box and either use sand or litter and scoop it as you would an indoor box. If you put a cat house out there and bed it with synthetic lambskin over some straw, Chessie can even live out there in cold weather. There are lots of pre-fab small dog houses available at pet stores or on the web, otherwise you’ll have to construct something both weather-proof and with a roof at something of a slant to let water and/or snow slide off. But certainly the top of that house will become a favorite roosting place for him.
I think making an outdoor cat space is going to change everything – and give Chessie (and whoever else joins him!) a higher quality of life with fresh air and visual and mental stimulation. This solves many of your issues in one fell swoop, with the addition of the Spirit essences to chill out ruffled feathers amongst the cats. Let me know if you undertake it and what the results are – good luck to you!
Tracie
The Cat Bible