Hi All,
We recently adopted an 18mth old, litter trained, cat from the local RSPCA, Lucy. She is currently residing in our spare room while we go through the slow process of introducing her to our cat Benji. While we are making progress with the introducing part we have a rather more messy problem.....
She has a litter tray in her room and is quite happy to pee in it. We haven't had any pee accidents. Poo, however, is a different issue. She won't poo in her tray. It is becoming quite an issue.
We decided to put Benji's (clean and fresh) tray in the area where she likes to poo (next to her litter tray, no less) and see if that helped the issue but instead it looks like she stood in the tray to poo in the gap between the trays. To make matters worse, Benji, who never uses his litter tray because he would much rather go out, poo'd in the place where his litter tray usually was. I am not sure if this was some sort of 'dirty protest' or whether it was conicidence and he really was caught short. But one thing I do know is, we need to train Lucy to use her tray. We can't continue like this.
She is really settled in and I really don't think that she has a health problem. I am certain this is a behavourial problem.
We have put paper on the floor, which she just scrats up so she can poo on the carpet. We bought a carpet mat but even that doesn't compare to the nice carpet apparently. I have read somewhere that we should pick the poo off the floor and put it in the tray and leave that in the room with her. Can anyone confirm that this is what we should do? The last thing we want is for her to start peeing on the floor too! I can already see a new carpet on the horizon
Any advise is greatly appreciated!
Many thanks
Jenny xx
