Pet Talk

by Cathy Davis
www.houltonanimalshelter.com
    While there are 1,000 pressing and important issues to discuss with you, I wanted to share a personal story. The more I talk about this, the more people tell me they’ve had similar experiences and perhaps our shared experience might help you sometime in the future.
    Several months ago I started to notice that one of my cats was avoiding the litter box when she urinated. We first noticed a puddle in a box that was sitting waiting to go out to the recycle bin, then another puddle on top of a pile of mail waiting to be opened (yuk). Obviously somebody had a problem.
    Cats avoid litter boxes for only a couple of reasons – they associate the litter box with pain which means they have some kind of condition or illness that causes them to have pain when they urinate.
    Cats avoid litter boxes because the box isn’t clean, and in multiple cat households, they might avoid a litter box because they have to wait in line to get into one or because there is some kind of power play going on where one cat might actually block the use of a box to another cat.
    Cats might be having a “hissy fit” (pardon the pun) over some change in your household, perhaps a recent move, the addition of a new pet or a new family member.
    And sometimes cats just plain don’t like the brand of litter you’ve chosen.
    In our house, I had five boxes for three cats, so it wasn’t a matter of not enough boxes. The boxes were clean, we hadn’t made any changes in the household and I hadn’t changed my brand of litter for years. This meant that one of my three cats possibly had a health issue so the next thing to do was to try to determine which cat was the offender.
    After much detective work we discovered it was Holly. I made a vet appointment and then proceeded to try to capture my Maine Coon and drag her off to the vet, only she had other ideas and went screaming through the house like I was chasing her with a flaming torch. She growled and hissed and scratched and bit and finally I called the vet and postponed the appointment until Holly was a little calmer.
    We were finally able to scoop her up and rushed her to the emergency clinic. If you could have heard the screaming and growling you would have thought we were trying to kill her, I have never seen a madder cat in my life. She had to be sedated so they could run some X-rays, only to find absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. She was put on prednisone for a week. After a week, no change, Holly was still avoiding the litter box.
    Another trip, this time with a regular appointment and Holly being much more cooperative, and blood work and more tests were run, still nothing could be found, no blockages, no abnormalities, no reason for her problem, but she obviously had a problem because she would squat for an hour and only leave a drop.
    The vet suggested we change Holly over from dry food to canned food. I had a hard time believing such a simple solution would work, but evidently the additional moisture in canned food would supplement the water she drank and help flush her system.
    After $600 in vet bills (yikes) I switched Holly and all my cats over to canned food and supplemented the canned with a very low ash Hill’s Science Diet dry. Holly was confined for two weeks to make sure she re-learned the use of the litter box. There has not been one single incident since.
    I also noticed that since I made this transition, there are no more hairballs coughed up all over the house. And I also read some information that you should try to avoid the fish flavored canned food when you have cats that are prone to these issues so my cats get chicken and beef and vegetables and they just love it.
    I hope this is helpful information to just one person out there who might be struggling with a similar situation. Never give up on your pets, there is a solution out there if you just keep working with your family vet and have a lot of patience!