I have two cats, one grey and black striped cat named Joey and one orange and white cat named Oliver, both about 9 years old. Joey has been with me since he was a kitten, adorable and loving the way a cat should be. Although he is damned expensive (several major medical issues over the years, costing many thousands of dollars) I don’t have any issue with spending the money to keep him happy and healthy.
The problem is with Oliver. I adopted him after I moved to New York and found myself working long hours with an insane commute so that Joey wouldn’t be alone all the time. He has been a part of the family for about 7 years now and I absolutely love him, but he is a jackass. He is violent with Joey, holding him down and biting his neck until he screams. At first I thought he was just asserting his dominance and it would stop after they sorted all of that out but it has continued semi-regularly since the first day he came to live with us. He scratches everything from the furniture to the walls. He pees everywhere, to the point where there are certain rooms of the apartment he isn’t allowed in because he will plop down and pee in the middle of a bed just as happily as he will use a litter box. I’ve had him examined by several vets and he is perfectly healthy so there is no medical reason for his behavior but they’ve put him on a special prescription food for cats with urinary tract issues just in case. It isn’t even that he feels a need to pee on soft things (though he does plenty of that, going so far as to pull the towels off the towel rack and peeing on them when they hit the floor) but just anything at all. Shelves, books, clothes, computers, and fairly regularly in the middle of the bathtub. We’ve had 2 or 3 litter boxes in every place we’ve lived that are kept in quiet places away from his food but he doesn’t seem to care. I’ve always cleaned everything up with Nature’s Miracle or mopped them down with vinegar to deal with the smell but I can’t figure out how to get him to stop peeing everywhere.
He is also a runner. If you open a door he darts through it and runs as far as he can get, whether that is to the far wall of the bedroom or down five flights of stairs in the hallway. Having to run after him barefoot into the hallway while wearing nothing but jammies because I made the mistake of opening the door to tell the Jehova’s Witnesses to go away is never fun. He lets me pick him up and carry him back into the apartment but that is the only time he lets anyone touch him below the neck. At any other time if you try to pet him or scritch him anywhere below the collar he bites or scratches. I can’t clip his claws because he’ll tear my arm off if I try. Our vet will come to the house and clip his claws for us but it involves two people, a towel and falconry gloves to manage it.
It isn’t that he is a bad cat. He is gently affectionate, laying next to you and snuggling his nose against you when he is happy or sitting in your lap and purring as long as you don’t touch his body. He handles the baby with grace, allowing her to do pretty much whatever she wants without so much as raising a paw. We’ve taught her that we show affection to kitties by waving so that helps a lot, but she does try to pet his belly and other stuff if he gets close and he doesn’t even bat an eye. I love him and I’m glad he is part of the family but we are running into a new problem now.
We are in the process of moving to Boston and I’ve talked to more than a dozen different apartment complexes that don’t allow pets at all. I’ve found three or four that allow up to two pets (we have both cats and also a small dog) that would work for us and I’m not above lying about having only two animals while keeping a third in the apartment with us but every place we’ve seen has wall to wall carpet. With him peeing everywhere I would have to basically buy a steam cleaner and run a vinegar rinse through the carpet almost every day. Between the peeing and the scratching it would without question destroy the carpeting of any apartment we rented. I’ve had the occasional thought of trying to find him a home he is better suited for but I know that the large majority of people won’t be accepting of his behavior and that adopting him out to someone else could easily mean that he would be abandoned to the streets or euthanized once they realized how difficult he can be.
Treats, scat mats, spraying him with a water bottle, etc. have all been tried and failed to change the way he behaves. We’ve been dealing with it by preventing as much as we can (for example, if someone rings the bell and he is within 20 feet of the door he gets shoved into the bathroom so he can’t make a run for it) and then basically just taking care of the aftermath as much as possible. This can’t go on forever though, especially now that we are moving somewhere that the damage he does will be magnified as pretty much every surface he touches will be absorbent and easily destroyed.
I am at the end of my kitty tether and I just don’t know what to do. How can I either get him to behave in a way that is acceptable or find a place for him where I know he can live out his life being the crotchety kitty he seems determined to be?