Hi I have a now 11yr old female cat who has stopped using the cat littler.

She pees and poos all around the cat litter but never IN it. I have tried picking her up and putting her in the cat littler but she struggles and run off. We have even tried buying a new cat litter as the one we were using we had had many years and thought the smell of other cats may have been putting her off.

We have moved house recently but i don't think this was the problem as she had the same problem long before we moved. We just didn't know which cat it was (we had four at one point and our eldest at the time seemed to be losing control of his bladder...or he was getting lazy)

The only other thing I think it could be is that we once changed the cat litter and it turned out to be very dusty. My cat reacted to the dust in a bad way (she is allergic to dust and pollen). Could that have put her off using it.

She has also had a stress problem where she just started to lick all the fur off her legs to the point that it became infected. We took her to our local vet and they advised us to use the hormone plugin (I have forgotten the name of it). It seemed to work as she now has fluffy legs again.

So my questions are:
Is there a way to retrain her to use the cat litter?
What could have caused her to stop using it in the 1st place?

Sorry for my rambling just wanted to give as much information as possible.

Look forward to your advice.
Alex

Hi

This is a big topic to cover. There's a variety of causes of an older cat failing to use a litter tray, some of which are medical in origin but other causes are behavioural. Your cat is undoubtedly stressed by the house move, stressed cats are more sensitive to change and she was obviously prone to stress already which would be why your vet recommended the feline pheromone plug-in. Problems with litter tray usage are often made worse the larger the number of cats that are trying to share because they often hate pooing in a soiled tray that another cat has used before them so will avoid doing so

You can't train/retrain a cat to using a litter tray but you can make the tray more attractive by placing it in a quieter part of the house, making sure it is away from food and water bowls, cleaning it out regularly for the above reasons- that cats hate over usage by too many cats. If you have too many cats to keep doing that you need to put more trays down. You sometimes need one per cat and one extra before all the cats are happy. It sounds a lot but its better than cleaning up after all the accidents. Finally changing the litter as you did was a good idea as some cats are very fussy and hate certain cat litter. The type of tray can also make a difference. Using a covered tray sometimes helps.
There's some ideas which I hope you can work on. Good luck

Cathy Wickenden BVet Med MRCVS
Barton Lodge Veterinary Centre
1 Midland Road, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, HP2 5BH
Tel: 01442 216048 24 hours
[www.bartonlodgevets.co.uk]