IGNORING THE LITTER TRAY
When a handsome Chinchilla started urinating everywhere but in his litter tray, Peter Neville thought there might be more to this problem than meets the eye.
Peter Neville helps when a cat isn’t toileting in the right spot.
Nadine’s plea for help arrived and we set up a Zoom appointment. I have become really fond of conducting Zoom consultations for my cat clients. With Zoom, I can observe the cats when they're in a relaxed manner, without them even being aware of my presence.
I asked Nadine to leave her camera on for me through the day of our consultation — prior to the actual discussion — with it aimed at the litter tray, so that I could watch the cats to see how they interacted with it.
A SMELLY PROBLEM
Since the camera showed quite a large area of Nadine’s living room, including the tray, I was able to observe Sam and Jack’s coming and goings for several hours. So when the time for my appointment with Nadine arrived, I already had a whole bunch of questions ready for her based on what I had seen.
Jack and Sam were brothers, bought from the same breeder when they were eight weeks old. They came home at 12 weeks and since then had lived with Nadine in her current home. Nadine told me that the cats had free access to the entire house and that they had always been indoor cats. She groomed them every day and both cats seemed to enjoy the experience. Nadine mentioned that she had bought an extra large litter tray for them, the same one they had been using since they had arrived and, until recently, they had done so without any problems.
Nadine noticed the first messes outside the tray around a month and a half prior to our Zoom meeting. She cleaned the tray but the smell didn’t abate, and she discovered that one of her larger pot plants was dying and that the soil had a very distinctive cat urine smell to it.
She soon realised that Sam was the main culprit.
She moved the plant but then
Nadine Christian says: Dear Peter, I share my home with two lovely Chinchilla boys named Jack and Sam. They are brothers and both are extremely affectionate towards me. My only problem with them is that one of them — Sam — isn’t using the litter tray provided. He urinates everywhere on everything and will leave piles of faeces in the oddest places. When I take him to the tray to eliminate, he will do so quite happily, but if I don’t take him, he chooses to go everywhere else when nature calls. How do I get him to stop doing this and to only use the tray?
A MOVING TARGET
discovered that he was also eliminating on rugs and other plants throughout the house. I told Nadine that I had noticed Jack pouncing on Sam quite a few times during the course of my observational morning with them. While we were chatting, Sam strolled past into view, heading for the litter tray. As he got there, Jack leapt out from behind the sofa and ambushed him. Nadine said that Jack really seemed to enjoy ambushing
Sam, and that that was actually one of the few occasions when the two of them would play.
However, I thought that what I was watching was definitely not play, and that Sam was certainly not enjoying it. I asked Nadine to keep a diary of the number of times that Jack pounced on Sam during the next couple of days, and get back to me.
During our follow up conversation, Nadine said she had been horrified to realise just how often the pouncing happened. Jack would ambush Sam around every corner, every time he went to the litter tray, around food bowls, when Sam was sleeping — in fact, just about every time that Jack happened to encounter his brother. No wonder the poor cat couldn’t use the litter tray — he didn’t have a chance to! It was easy to see that Jack needed a lot more stimulation in his life than Sam, who was, in Nadine’s own words, her couch potato cat. Jack loved to hunt and as an indoor cat, those opportunities were limited and, unfortunately, his brother was his only available moving target!
This ambushing was very stressful for Sam, particularly around specific targets like the litter box. If we were going to stop Sam’s inappropriate elimination behaviour, we had to first stop Jack’s inappropriate hunting behaviour.
This we achieved by first providing opportunities for play and exploring within the confines of the home. Nadine was not keen on giving the cats outdoor access, and so we looked at indoor alternatives that could meet Jack’s need for stimulation.
I didn’t want Nadine to rush out and spend a lot of money on toys, so we looked at ways to introduce novelty without spending much. Cardboard boxes, branches from trees outside, and freshly cut flowers brought into the house on a daily basis are perfect and free!
These new items could be placed throughout the house so that Jack had to walk around to find them.
Each one could be enriched with food hidden inside but the aim would be to refresh the food, and move or replace the items every day.We also used aromatherapy oils, herbs, and spices from the kitchen cupboard to introduce novel smells. (Always check for safety with this idea).
Sam and Jack were also each given new food bowls — instead of the two medium sized bowls filled with kibble all day long, they were each given smaller containers, such as kitchen towel cardboard inner roll holders that only held a few kibbles hidden around the house, to encourage the cats to search for them. Nadine’s brother brought two new cat perching posts for her, which we placed both up and downstairs, with views out of windows. We nominated Nadine’s sunniest room as the new cat playroom, where we introduced several new obstacles and hiding spots like tunnels, boxes, crackle sheets, and paper ‘tents’, along with a variety of indoor catnip plants and other edible cat-friendly plants.
For toys, we made a variety of DIY fishing rod types that could be used to entice the cats to play, and lastly, three litter trays were introduced in various spots around the house. If Nadine saw Jack heading for Sam, she was asked to throw a small ball of paper in his line of sight to distract him away from his brother. With all these ideas in place, I bid farewell to Nadine and her two cats, with the promise to follow up a month later.
Jack would ambush Sam around every
corner...