Cat Urinating out of box

[bluesecrets]

We have a cat that has started urinating outside of the litter often. We took him to the vet after Thanksgiving, but she said nothing was wrong; it was most likely just stress from moving into a new house (which we did in July). He tends to favor things left around - like if I lay my coat on a chair, or the sofa blankets laid on the back of the couch, a pair of jeans that H may leave on the bed, etc, so the most obvious answer is never leave any cloth laying out anywhere... which really isn't 100% reasonable with things like the bedding on the guest bed, pillows on chairs, sofa blankets, etc. Has anyone else experienced this or know of anything we can do that may help him stop?


Oh, and while I'm thinking about it - it's not that the litter is too full. We have more boxes than cats and clean them nightly.

[greenandwhite]

I'm new here so I hope you don't mind advice from a newb but there are a couple things you could try.

One is feliway plug-ins. They release happy pheromones and help to calm down stressed out animals. I've not tried them myself but I've heard good things about them. I do not suggest using calming collars, we tried that on Catpig and it just made a huge mess.

Once the cat has had time to settle, you may need to retrain him to use the litter box. I've read a lot of different methods to do this. One is for a few days, keep the cat in the bathroom with his food and water until all his messes are in the box. Once he's better with that, give him the run of one room and make sure that every single urine spot ends up in the box. Eventually, you can give him the run of the house. I've also heard of starting them in a large kennel with a cat box, and then getting to the bathroom and so on and so forth.

Do the cats all get along well? If he is being bullied, he may be afraid to go to the litter box.
Hope this helps a little!


ETA Also, I'm sure you know this but make sure you're cleaning the spots with an enzymatic cleaner like Nature's Miracle so he won't keep coming back to his previous pee spots.

[mnvegas]

When we moved into our new house in Sept. one of our cats starting peeing outside the litter box. She always went to her box but would pee right next to it. We tried Feliway plugins, spray, new litter box etc. but nothing worked.

Someone on here suggested Dr. Elsey's cat attract litter and it worked! As soon as we changed the litter our cat was using the litter box again. Definitely give it a try.

[urbancowgirl]

One of my cats had had litter box issues for years. When we moved cross country a few months ago, it got particularly bad and we ended up putting him on anti-anxiety meds (amitryptyline). It has been really effective. We've used a Feliway plug-in for years and we switched to Cat Attract litter (which he seems to prefer over our old litter), but the meds have helped the most. It sucks giving him the pill every night, but I much prefer that to cleaning pee out of carpet every day. He was sluggish for the first couple of weeks, but he's back to normal now. Another positive side effect is that he doesn't beg for food as much as he used to. It's relatively inexpensive, too (about $12 for 30 days worth of pills).

ETA- I wanted to add that we only put him on meds after exhausting all other means of correcting this problem. It's something we've been dealing with for years and this was a last resort.