They are also capable of being a solid and a liquid simultaneously. And I’m convinced at least some of them can teleport.
Can I tag a question onto this thread? For reasons I won’t go into here (long story), we’re currently trying to get 5 cats to live together peacefully. It’s still a work in progress but the worst acting out seems to be over, except that somebody (one of the girl cats, I’m pretty sure) keeps peeing right by the front door - a classic spot, apparently, for marking territory.
I asked the vet if there was any repellent we could put in that spot to stop it; he suggested surrendering and just putting a litter box there! Um, no … the spot is about 2 feet from our kitchen table, so that’s not happening.
It’s a tile floor, near a storage closet with cleaning supplies, so easy and quick to grab some rags and a spray bottle - but if I could, I’d rather put something in that spot that made whoever is being naughty give it up (I believe a torbie named Thelma is probably the guilty party, but I digress).
If anyone has any repellent suggestions, I’m all ears. Or eyes, as the case may be. Apologies if this was covered earlier in the thread (I haven’t read the last few dozen posts), but I did a search on “repellant” and did not find it here.
I surrendered in that fashion once when a really old cat decided she was going to piss in my bedroom (which had been her go-to space for comfort and refuge for 17 years, so I wasn’t going to shut her out); but she was willing to accept a pan on the far side of the room from my bed. (To my relief, the other cats of the household didn’t seem to expect an upstairs catpan after she died; and they’d rarely used it while she was living.) I wonder whether yours would accept one on the far side of the kitchen from the table, if there is such a spot? I don’t know how big your kitchen is; I have a large bedroom.
Since you mention discussing with the vet I presume you’ve already had her checked for physical urinary probems.
Somebody’s probably going to come into the thread and suggest Feliway; I’ve never tried it, myself, but it’s probably worth at least discussing with the vet.
Thanks @thorny_locust. We do have Feliway (which is for calming, not repelling, so I don’t know that it would help in this circumstance) in a couple of outlets, but our house is built to have continuous air circulation with the outdoor breezes flowing through - it has slatted windows at the base of all the outside walls, and even if we wanted to we couldn’t seal it up. So, Feliway flows away! (The open air design was an epic problem when I had a flea infestation, as I couldn’t fumigate the house. I’m still impressed that I summoned the energy needed to manually do enough flea control every day for months to completely eliminate them.)
The door is by a small nook that is completely filled by the kitchen table and chairs - there is no room for a litter box, even if I was willing to have one there. Ah well.
I think that the idea is that pissing in the wrong place may be caused by anxiety, so that calming the cat may remove the impulse to do so.
I sometimes forget what drastically different climates Dopers live in from each other!
Been a while, but great success. I woke up this morning with the very skittish cat 2 (SpotDot) sleeping on my bed, between my legs.
Her bolder brother does this all the time, and in typical cat behavior takes over the space, but this is the first time she has done this.
Her brother, Moonlight, is being an ass because he knows where the cat treats are, but he can’t reach the shelf they are on. So he is knocking stuff off the shelf he can reach, like a whiskey bottle.
Both cats are now inside/outdoor cats, though I prefer to keep them inside. The fact that I have young children occasionally around helps them escape, but they both know the way inside. Very stressful when I don’t see one for a while, and I have to choose to leave a door open at the risk of losing both. But they seem fine with the great outdoors, albeit more interested in the great cat feeder.
For some cats, I’m convinced this is intentional blackmail.
“Dis is a nice coffee cup youse got here. Be a shame if something waz to happen to it.”
But congrats on the relationship progress. Some of my sweetest cuddlebug kittehs started out very skittish and unsociable.
It’s certainly intentional communication; especially if the cat does it while the human’s watching.
Congratulations on cuddled-up cat on the bed! Patience is rewarded; and will get more such rewards in the future.
Excellent news on the sleeping with.
I knew my latest adoption had decided to trust me when Merc walked over my body instead of down around my legs to get to his preferred side to sleep with me.
Years ago, I took in a dog.
She had been briefly taken in by friends of mine who had discovered that she was about to be taken to a shelter; but who couldn’t keep her. They brought her over, we walked around some, we brought her into the presence of a cat; and then they left her here.
She spent most of her first three days here, every minute that she could, waiting right next to the door they’d left through. I don’t know whether she was waiting for them to come back, or waiting for her previous human; but she was obviously waiting to be taken back by somebody. She was willing to leave the door long enough to eat, or to be taken outside on a leash; but otherwise she was right by that door. She’d let me pat her, but she was waiting for Somebody Else. I didn’t at first absolutely trust her with the cats, so at night I shut her in a room by herself – and I had a terrible time getting her into and keeping her in that room, because it wasn’t the room with that door in it (the kitchen, with the door in it, has no door between it and the rest of the house to close off; and also has the cat pans in a far corner, so I wouldn’t have wanted to shut the cats out of it anyway.) As soon as I let her out in the morning, back by the door again.
Well into the afternoon of the third day, I was working in the office, and she was lying by the door. Then she stood up; walked into the office; and lay down again – next to me, in contact with my leg.
Loyalty transferred. I tried to be worthy of it.
We really don’t deserve dogs.
I have two. A Weimeraner cross German Short Haired pointer, and a random farm dog, mostlly black labrador cross German Short Haired Pointer.
The boy, the Weimeraner, does actually deserve a human to look after him. He was the runt of the litter, and I think he suffered oxygen starvation at birth. He’s not a clever dog. He needs help.
His adopted sister is wildly intelligent. She is one of those dogs you need to watch, even if she finished first in her puppy training course.
You get what you take. Huxley, the improbably misnamed male is as dull as a plank (I named him after Aldous) and Tallulah is quite bright. Not sure why we gave her that name, which seens like a stripper name - but she is super sharp. Cleverest dog I have ever known.
Sadly for me, they both live with my ex-wife.
Tallulah is a cat killer, so she can’t come to my house.