What is the point of this article?
We owned a cat for 18 years. Since she was about 2 years old when we got her, that meant she was at least 20 years old when we finally had her put to sleep
She did not urinate in her litter box at all for the last five years of her life, as far as we could tell. She would poop near the litter box, but the box itself was not touched. We found urine on almost any fabric left on the floor (from towels to pillows to dirty clothes), although she seemed to prefer a couple of carpeted corners in the living room.
This did cause problems, and we did seriously consider putting her down a few times because of it. However, she was still obviously happy and healthy despite the problems (and this was confirmed by the vet), and she was such a loving companion that we just couldn’t do it.
The vet’s only real suggestion was that we “re-train” her to the box by leaving her in a small room with the litter box whenever we couldn’t supervise her. Since we both worked full-time, and couldn’t follow her everywhere even if we were at home, this seemed like a very cruel fate for a cat who LOVED to sit in sunshine in the windows, and who HATED to be outdoors.
In the end, we had her put to sleep because of kidney problems, and only after it was obvious that she could not cope with the discomfort anymore. We then bought tons of pet deodorant and Oxyclean, and steam cleaned the carpets with a mixture of the two.
Given how much companionship she gave us over the years, the price was not significantly high to us to put up with the idiosyncracy. However, I believe that any inventor of a cat “diaper” that cats can tolerate would make a fortune.
One of cats is a pee-er so I empathize with this woman.
We solved the problem by turning her into an outdoor cat and letting her sleep in the unfinished (but warm) basement when it’s cold outside. It was either that or give her away to a shelter. I’ve been trying to cure her of the pee outside the litterbox habit for many years. None of our solutions have ever worked.
I can’t possibly let her roam the house at will. The last time that happened she ruined a mattress, my favorite coat and my dining room carpet in the space of a week. Not only that but I am also a homeowner. This house is the biggest investment in our portfolio. Experience has taught me that kitty urine is a very hard smell to remove. The cat is nice but if it’s a choice between $300,000 in equity to finance a pleasant retirement or a house I can’t sell she’s just going to have get used to the basement and the backyard.
I found this quote from the article rather interesting:
Quite frankly, if she kept a cat in pain from cancer for weeks just because “she kept breaking down sobbing”, that to me sounds like she’s not a very responsible pet owner.
And why did she make it a point to describe her emotional turmoil as her cancer-stricken cat’s health declined, yet later on in the article dismissed peeing-cat as “just a pet” not worthy of such deep feeling?
Reading this thread has actually made me choke up some, as just last week I had to make the same decision that the author of the article made. We had our cat for 15 years and she was the happy queen of the house until kid #1 was born, followed by kid #2 and finally, last year, the dog moved in. It was too much commotion for her and she started spending 99% of her time under the bed, with the remaining 1% spent peeing and pooing all over the carpets. We tried re-training her to use the litter box. We tried repellent sprays. We tried keeping the dog out of the house. (And of course, we couldn’t get rid of the kids). All to no avail. So, we tried to find someone to take her. No takers. I finally loaded her up and took her to the ASPCA and was told that if I left her with them that they’d likely not find an adoptive family and she’d be put down. I couldn’t do it…she was older than our kids, no, she WAS one of our kids! Two months went by and we continued to clean up her messes until I noticed that her stools were bloody. In a way, we got a cop-out: she was now clearly sick and given her age, we’d would likely have just been prolonging any misery she was in. So, putting her to sleep came much easier knowing this. Unlike the article’s author, I would have felt very sorry if we had eventually put her down just because of the wetting problems; I would have seen it as a failure on my part to adequately solve the problems that she was facing that were no fault of her own.
I beg to differ. More to the point, most of the human race begs to differ, as nearly every religion (and many atheists) hold that humans have inherent moral value.
They usually hold that animals do, too; just much less.
This has come up in my family a couple times. One was a kitty my mom took care of when it’s owner was on an extended overseas work assignment. The poor kitty was a one-man cat, and couldn’t handle her owners absense. Even in the best of times she was a bundle of nerves, but without her owner she was pretty neruotic.
I don’t think you really understand the depth of the problem. It’s not just a little pee here and there. Cats get diarrhea. Poop everywhere, every day. Smeared in to the carpets. On the pillows. Between the bedclothes. Every day mom would have to come home and search around the house for where the kitty pooped. Somtimes she’d miss it for a couple days- in closets, on the beloved quits, heirloom clothes that slipped off of hangers. She wasn’t able to close off the house because of it’s design and her other pets, and frankly she wasn’t ready to give up one of the rooms in her house. Kitty couldn’t go outside because she was declawed by a previous owner. Probably a good hour a day was spent dealing with poop, pee, and the numerous litterboxes scatted throughout the house in hopes that kitty would use one. Giving her away would only make things worse- all her problems to begin with were seperation troubles and moving trauma. I think kitty survived and returned to her owner, but there was some serious talk of putting her down.
The carpets are a loss. Somtimes you simply don’t notice where a cat has peed and hasn’t peed, and it can get pretty bad quickly. Mom doesn’t make much money, so she’s saving to re-do a room a year. Some of the rooms (including the one I have to sleep in when I visit) are still noxious even though kitty has long returned to her owner. It will probably a decade before mom’s house is the same.
Pets are our beloved companions, and we do have great responsiblity towards them. I have my own pets that I love maybe a little to much. But pets arn’t people, and there is a point that is too much. For some, that point is a $5,000 operation they can’t pay. For others it’s a house full of carpets and daily torment. It’s a heartbreaking choice, but the simple fact is that MeowMeow isn’t going to miss life when she’s dead- MeowMeow doesn’t even really have a sense of self, after all- and although we’ll miss MeowMeow, we’ll have fond memories and our sanity left. Countless animals are euthenized every day, and although it sucks to add the one we love to the numbers, sometimes there isn’t a better option.
stochastic and even sven examples are both illustrating why it is important to consider your lifestyle before taking on a pet.
Kiminy and lavenderlemon examples are both people willing to make it work because they committed to having a pet and being responsible for it.
I would love to have a dog, but I don’t lead a dog-conducive lifestyle and I don’t think my cat would adjust well to another pet in the household, therefore, it is one cat for me, for now.
When I used to work at a vet clinic, we had a woman bring in a cat to be put down just because it threw up hairballs and she had tried everything and couldn’t deal with the cat any more. It was a long-haired cat, she never brushed it, never tried CatLax, never changed its diet, never tried to find it a new home. Coincidentally, she got it from a friend of a friend of mine and called that person after she dropped off the cat. We had decided not to euthanize it right away because we were busy and there was no appointment, the owner didn’t want to be there and didn’t want the remains, and the cat wasn’t in any pain. and quite honestly, we had the cat on the table and the blue juice in an uncapped syringe and the damn thing was just laying there purring…we didn’t have the heart to do it. The previous owner called to see if we had killed it yet and wanted it back if we hadn’t. Before it was all said and done, the original owner, the new owner who surrendered the cat, and about half of the staff of the clinic all wanted the cat. He was a sweetheart and even when in a strange environment, he purred as soon as you touched him and was oh-so-soft and fluffy. We ended up sending it back to the person who had surrendered him in the first place with a tube of CatLax and a brush for like $10 and they lived happily ever after.
Just because someone says they tried everything, doesn’t mean they did.
My son and my daughter both adopted kittens from my son’s first grade teacher many years ago. These cats were both female and I spent the money to have them spayed and declawed so they could remain inside cats. My son’s cat took to peeing in a corner on the carpet, like others have mentioned. Soon after we moved to the country, he let his cat outside one evening and she was never seen again.
My daughter’s cat was beautiful, my favorite of the two. But she suddenly decided not to use her litterbox. My daughter was also, unfortunately, allergic to pet dander, so I decided to take the cat in to have her put to sleep after putting up with the poop and pee on the floor for months.
The vet’s waiting room was filled with farmers on that Saturday morning. I left the cat out in the car and went in to write the check, thinking I’d get that done, go get the cat and scram. But they wanted me to bring her in, take her to the back room and THEN take care of the paperwork. By the time I got back to the desk to pay, I was crying my eyes out because I hated to do this to her.
I went back home and a while later, the vet’s office called saying one of the girls who worked there was going to take the cat home with her and let it be an outside cat. I never felt right about that either, since she’d been declawed and couldn’t have defended herself, but I guess I was grateful that at least she was given a chance.
Yeah, but just because Goldie pisses on the floor, yowls, &c., that doesn’t mean that birds and small mammals should be killed. If it’s between Goldie & wild birds, then Goldie’s got to go.
I couldn’t read the whole article and I don’t know what sort of good-faith effort was made to unload the cat, so this is with a grain of salt. I see no reason to keep a cat that pisses all over my kids’ pillows. It seems harsh; however, I don’t see how the alternative is any better.*
*I suspect that they might have been like the folk in my behavior lab who had “stupid” rats. There are no stupid rats, only bad trainers.
I agree. And I think she sounds like the type who didn’t try everything.
What’s the basis for making that decision?
Why is the life of a cat of greater value than that of a bird? Why should hundreds of birds die just so the cat lives?
Well, unless the author is in Eastern Europe or North Africa/Arabia, the cat is an invasive species. That’s a pretty big start. In addition, the original dilemma was living w/ the cat or killing it, and moving it outside simply shifted the dilemma to a choice between living w/ the cat or killing birds (and small mammals, including rabbits). The choice of moving the cat outside doesn’t fundamentally change the question of whether a pissed-on pillow is more valuable than a small animal’s life; the choice is the same, except that it takes away the cat’s easy lifestyle and sends a lot of other animals to the gallows. Lastly, I like birds.
Except that they shit all over my outdoors. I just had to wash my car to get rid of the bird shit. I live across the road from a lake, the flying shitters shit all over everything. I wish we had more seagull killing cats.
And rabbits crap in the grass and chipmunks eat my garden and shrews invade my home and mice piss everywhere constantly. I almost sat in a big pile of what I am told was raccoon shit last weekend.
If you like birds more than cats, that’s fine. But that’s a lame reason. You could argue people are an invasive species.
inherent moral value? No. Only to other humans. Which is only natural, I suppose. But we have no value or purpose outside our own existence. We have, however, the ability to define our own purpose.
Well the first thought that came to my mind when I read the OP was, “wow, that’s harsh.”
But the more I think about it the less I really felt that the author was a “bad person” or that his/her decisions was necessarily a horrible or monstrous one. Like someone very appropriately said in this thread, a cat urine soaked house is no environment for a human being. I’ve always been pretty good with animals. I’ve always been able to house break and train many natural bad habits out of dogs/cats that I’ve owned throughout my life. I know just about every trick in the book, so I can definitely imagine how frustrating it would be to do everything possible and still have nothing work when it comes to house breaking a cat.
And while letting the cat loose or giving it to a shelter may seem like better options, there’s always the fact that most people wouldn’t deal with a problem cat humanely (and it’s a big assumption that the cat would even be adopted.) They’d cast it loose on the streets or even worse. In a lot of ways I can see at as being perfectly correct that putting the cat down is more humane than putting it through the torment and suffering that could come about by letting it loose in some unfamiliar area or sending it off to a shelter where it will live in a cramped cage for a few weeks until it’s put down because no one will adopt a cat that pisses everywhere.
Although still, for me it’d be hard to give my former pet a 0% chance. I’d probably try to give the cat to people I know, explain to them that it’s a problem cat but maybe their situation is more suited to keeping it, or maybe they can modify its behavior. Giving it to the shelter for adoption would be a harder decision. Firstly I’d probably have to lie to get a shelter to take it if it was truly an unadoptable cat… and I’m not going to lie, secondly since the cat would almost certainly be unadoptable I’d just be prolonging the inevitable… not something I would consider an act of kindness.
I guess I’ve never understood why people love cats so much. They’re just animals. If people would love their fellow humans as much as they love their damn pets, we would have a lot less problems.
So are we, Bubba. But there’s still hope for us. Maybe. 
I think the cats’ll outlive us, personally.