Please help

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FrankZaccone
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Please help

Post by FrankZaccone »

I have a 4 month old Persian kitten. She is a doll.. the problem is she refuses to use a pitter box. She poops on the floor. I have two litter boxes… we keep them VERY clean.. they are cleaned 4-6 times a day. We have been to the vet to have her checked and she is healthy, we have tried timeouts, new and different litter. We have not moved or brought any other animals in. She will go in her litter box if we put here in it but unless we actually put her in it she just squats wherever she happens to be standing… very frustrating. It appears to be a behavioral issue maybe? Please help
Joe_Danger
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Re: Please help

Post by Joe_Danger »

This kinda stuff can be difficult to deal with but not impossible.
If she goes in specific spots every time you're going to have to consider putting litter trays there, I specifically mean trays, something shallow she can walk in and out of with no effort but that has enough depth to have a decent amount of litter in.
This is going to take some time but if she walks in every time she is eventually going to learn to associate the litter with pooping and not just peeing too.
Something, somewhere got rewired in her brain and it seems she only associates the litter with her need to pee and not her need to poop. 4 months is a tad old to be making such mistakes but again, I don't think it's an impossible thing to fix, just one that might take some time.

Now from what I understand, I assume you live in the 1st world/the UK or some such, you guys should have specific litters there that attract cats to them or stuff that you add to the litter to attract them, I'm sure someone is going to post more info on this.
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Mollycat
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Re: Please help

Post by Mollycat »

Part of your problem could be overcleaning. Some cats like it clean but others don't. I use clumping litter, I scoop once daily unless I notice something bad in there, and a full change maybe once a month or so when I notice the clumps start to crumble and not work properly.

It doesn't sound behavioural in the sense of marking or a protest if she just goes where she stands, more a case of never having been house trained?

As you posted in the middle of the night, are you in the US and is she declawed?


Edit as I hadn't spotted before about time out. Punishment very rarely works with cats, especially as most of their problem behaviours are a sign of some kind of distress rather than naughtiness. Cats are by nature very clean animals, that's how even a 6 week old kitten normally comes ready litter trained by the mother, so at 4 months old that is quite odd.
Last edited by Mollycat on Tue Jul 13, 2021 8:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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fjm
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Re: Please help

Post by fjm »

I would be interested to know her background - was she raised somewhere where she had no choice about where to poop? Toilet training problems are very common in puppy mill dogs, born and raised in a cage, and I wonder if there may be something similar going on here. Does she do it when you are watching her, or choose a spot out of sight? Is there any pattern in the surfaces she chooses? Has she always done it, or is it a recent change?
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Ruth B
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Re: Please help

Post by Ruth B »

I have to agree with the others, it can be sorted but it might take quite some time to do so.

You have already had her vet checked to make sure there isn't a medical reason so that is the first suggestion already ticked off.

You have tried new, different litters and they haven't made a difference, so that is the second suggestion tried, but it might be worth keeping on trying different ones, different textures, grain size, clumping or non clumping, you might suddenly find one she likes.

I would suggest trying different styles of litter box as well, you already have two, but if possible you might want to add more, shallow ones, deep ones, ones with lids, ones with out lids, deep filled or shallow filled.

I agree with Mollycat that over cleaning might be a problem, the scent of a slightly used litter tray might be enough to tell her that is where she need to go to do her business, at the moment it sounds like it is as clean as the the rest of the house so no where smells any different to allow her to distinguish where her toilet area is.

I will also add to be careful what you use to clean up with, some bleaches will break down to have a scent that is very similar to that of old urine, which means a cat can mistake our effort to clean up an area with giving it the scent of where they can go to toilet. There are specialist cat urine cleaning products that use enzymes to break down the urine without leave a scent behind, they are the best thing to use to clean up with.

Personally I would say don't punish her if she goes in the wrong place, and I'm not convinced timeouts work as it is very hard for the cat to associate the timeout punishment with what they have done wrong. On the other hand if she does use the tray then give her lots of praise for doing so.

Finally if the suggestions don't work, and I would suggest keeping a diary of what you try and any results that occur, I would ask your vet about a referral to a cat behaviourist, it could be that one that comes into your home can instantly see the problem that we, just by chatting to you, can't. Keeping the diary would also help them see what you have already tried and keep you from having to repeat it all for them.
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Re: Please help

Post by Joe_Danger »

I missed the time out part too.
Cat's minds don't work like those of humans, punishing a cat for anything, especially going in the wrong spot can only lead to more problems.

I don't want to assume anything, but I've seen one too many cases of people "punishing" their cats by rubbing their nose where they went and saying no or giving them a lil slap with their hand or a newspaper. That is a recipe for disaster because that way you are just confusing the cat and by rubbing her nose where she went you TEACH her to go there. The fact that you brought up time out tells me you're not quite familiar with how cats think so you might have made that rubbing her nose in the spot she went to thing and scolding her which would explain why she goes there.
I've dealt with way too many people IRL over the years who do this and then abandon their cats when the cats have imprinted the wrong surfaces and textures as their elimination spots.

I REALLY hope this wasn't the case with you.

Back to the time out
By the time you put your cat in time out she had forgotten what happened, she just sees that she is being put away but does not understand why, you can't expect a cat to connect her going in the wrong place to your punishment because of the way their attention span works, all the movement and talking and what not had already long distracted them whatever it was they did wrong, not to mention the cat already has that surface imprinted as her elimination surface so it doeson't even know it did anything wrong.
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