Shadow Cat — Update 3
Dec 27, 2022 — Jan 17, 2023
Shortly after we published our last update on Shadow, everything went sideways.
She had been making some fairly good progress. Coming out into the house, checking things out, even joining in the nightly howls from Taffy for the bedtime snack. She was even playing with us and the mousey on a string. She was hiding less frequently in her cube and we felt that some progress was being made.
Then Taffy decided to go into Shadows’ room and have a face to face verbal challenge. Shadow hissed and hid. Taffy puffed up and hissed and was removed by us.
That was December 28. December 30, Shadow began to pee on the couch in her room.
We quickly researched and tried to follow all the suggestions given on the subject.
Completely clean the soiled area, spray with Feliway (which appears to be the most popular brand of cat pheramone), cover area with plastic, cover plastic with fabric.
We meticulously followed these suggestions, plus, we returned the cat integration back to point zero. Revert to keeping them completely separate — closed door — no child-gates. No interface between them at all.
For the first three days, we had to clean up, remove the soiled, respray the couch and re cover everything three times daily! In the mean time we called for help from our two cat rescue pals here on Medium Beth Bach and Deborah Camp.
They assured us that we were doing the best suggested things to try to stop this behaviour, although they both suggested the possibility of a bladder or kidney problem, and suggested a possible vet visit if the behaviour did not stop.
We continued with this program and concluded that Shadow was afraid to go in her covered litter box, and that she wanted to be able to watch the door when using the litter box.
We removed the cover off the litter box and, following a suggestion from our local pet store, temporarily added litter boxes to the couch, which was protected with plastic and an old sheet. Once we did both these things, Shadow returned to using the original litter box without the cover, but continued to pee in the couch area, but IN the new litter boxes. This was when we noted that one of the new boxes was too shallow and Shadow would pee near the edge, and hit the sheet (and hence the plastic under liner!).
We had to change the sheet and the plastic a few times, but finally Shadows’ aim got better and there were fewer accidents.
Each change we made was about a week apart, so as to not freak Shadow out too much.
Our next move was to remove the couch. A tough decision for us because it has been with us for a number of years, but we figured it owed us nothing and that we would never be able to completely get rid of the pee smell from the original pee mistake.
However, getting rid of the couch meant that Shadow would have nowhere to hide, so we had to rig up some cardboard along the front of the bookcase so she could use that.
We laid plastic down on the carpet where the couch had been, covered it with an old sheet and put the two litter boxes on top. Then we held our breath.
More in our next update…
