Older cat pissing in house. help!

We have a cat who’s about 15 years old. She’s a bit fat, not huge, but otherwise seems in good health. A few months ago, she started peeing on our bed. Like, every day. Even several times a day. Every time this happens, we have to change and wash all the sheets, the comforter goes to the dry cleaner, etc. Its a huge pain.

I took her to the vet, who tried antibiotics in case of a bladder infection, tested for diabetes or some other conditions. All negative. The vet has concluded that it’s a “behavioral problem”.

We’ve tried the obvious solution: close the bedroom door. Of course, we sometimes forget to close the door, and she makes a beeline right to the bed and takes a leak. Little shit. And now she’s started to find other places to take a leak around the house, always involving some comfortable place where she likes to sleep. Pillows on the couch, some carpet in a guest room. Etc.

This has gone on for weeks, and I’m at wits end – this has to stop. The only solutions I see are:

    1. Find her a new home.
    1. Put her down.

For #1, Who the hell wants a piss-cat as a guest? And she has no front claws and has always lived indoors, I can’t see her making it as an outdoor cat.

#2 was a friend’s suggestion, much to my horror; she described the situation as a “deal breaker”. I mentioned it to my wife, who looked like she was considering it. This doesn’t seem acceptable – the cat could live another 10 years, I can’t see taking it to the shelter to be put down. And what do we tell our 8-year-old about what happened to the cat?

Other details: we also have a younger cat, about 2 yrs, in the house. The two cats don’t get along, but this has been the case since they’ve been together, and is not a new issue. There have been no other recent changes in our household that I can see causing this behavior change.

Suggestions?

Have you tried Feliway spray? It’s a soothing spray, meant to make cats feel calm, which is supposed to reduce their peeing in bad places. Also, Cat Attract cat litter solved our boy’s urination problems. It has no odor that a human can detect, but apparently cats find it irresistible.

If all that fails, I have to side with your friend and wife. I’d simply tell my kid some variant of the truth - the cat is so unhappy and suffering and making all of us so unhappy that it will be better if the vet puts her out of her pain by killing her. Trust me, a happy cat will not piss in its own bed.

My cat was doing that, and it turned out he has a bladder tumor. :frowning:

Medicine is keeping him alive (and stopped the peeing), but it can’t be operated on and it will eventually kill him.

Our family has had to both give a cat away and put another down.

With the former cat, he peed almost everywhere but the litter box off and on for two years. I have to give credit to my parents; they were damn patient. Anyway, we had strong inklings it was a behavioral problem (he was the newest of three cats), and thus gave him up to a local pet shelter, with detailed info regarding our cat’s problems. Thankfully, they found him a great new home in another, as of then, cat-less household where he’s been a great pet ever since (no peeing, yay!).

Sadly, the case isn’t quite as fortunate with our other cat, who had been doing great for the first 5-6 years. He eventually developed a crystal problem, and would pee on my parent’s bed as a result. After numerous trips to the vet, and an equal amount of treatments, we finally made the decision to put him down.

It wasn’t easy, but in the end, they are just cats and sometimes there’s only so much that can feasibly be done.

You really can’t remember anything happening, any change in routine, before this started happening? If it really is behavioral and not medical, it was likely triggered by something unsettling your cat. Any combination of things could do this… a change in litter or litterbox location, a new household member or frequent visitor (human or animal), new food, a new and pervasive smell, a change in amount of attention received, etc., etc.

My advice, if you really want to keep the cat, is to first, get a second opinion from another vet. If they still say she’s healthy, start thinking and looking critically at the cat and her environment. She’s peeing outside the litterbox because something about the litterbox makes it, to her, an undesirable place to eliminate. You just need to find out why. Does she use the litterbox for peeing at all anymore? Does she use it preferentially under any set of circumstances? Next time you discover her peeing somewhere else, go look at/smell the litterbox. Is it clean enough? Would she be stepping in pee or poop just to get in there? If she does use the litterbox for pooping, why would she pee elsewhere? Does the cat’s urine smell stronger than it used to, maybe, and make the litterbox unpleasant? (Changing litter brands or food brands, or just cleaning very fastidiously, can make a difference here.)

I know it’s frustrating, but there are plenty of things you can try to determine the source of this behavior before you resort to killing her. I’ve had similar problems with my cat, but after much experimentation determined ultimately that she just requires a very clean, virtually odor-free place to pee, and so I clean the litterbox every freaking day.

Good luck with this; I hope you figure it out. And once you do, I hope it’s not a deal-breaker. :frowning:

Oh, wait, I remembered one more thing - sometimes a plastic litter box will get microscopic etches or scratches with age. These can trap urine odor, and make the cat unwilling to use the box, even if you’ve just changed the litter. Try getting a new, identical box and see if that helps.

And don’t, of course, use ammonia for cleaning. Ammonia smells like urine to animals, and can make them either decide that’s where urine goes, or that’s where their urine *shouldn’t *go, 'cause the Big Monster urinates there.

Just a WAG, but have you changed your brand of laundry detergent lately?

We had a similar problem with an old cat. I figured she was just getting senile, and also that once the pee smell was in the mattress, she’d smell it even if the sheets/bedspread/mattress cover were washed.

We solved it by keeping her out of the bedrooms, but she did start peeing all over the place – again, we attributed it to senility. We loved her a lot so we just put up with it. The main problem was that our next cat, apparently sniffing out the odor of cat urine from the previous one, started peeing in all the same places. She was young, however, so we gave her to someone who wanted an outdoor cat.

I think it would be cruel to give away a 15-year-old cat. That’s a pretty advanced age and I would think the cat would be bewildered by new surroundings. Similarly, I don’t think the cat has the potential to live another 10 years … 18 or 19 is considered quite old for a cat.

You might want to have your cat’s kidney function checked by the vet as well. Cats with kidney disease tend to pee wherever they stop, and apparently it’s relatively common.

Our cat just passed away last week, and she’d been struggling with it for the past couple of years.