Grrrr

[graculus]

I'm now starting to get an inkling of possible reasons why manky!cat may have become a stray... ;)

Got home and discovered he had gone upstairs and peed on my bed. Twice. Including getting under the duvet and peeing on the mattress. As you can imagine, I was seriously underwhelmed by this.

Comments

[rivier.livejournal.com]

I'm going to come over as a great big cat apologist now, but in cat-psych terms, that might well suggest two things - that this is a pretty insecure cat, which you would expect from a stray - but also that it feels safer than it's felt for a while by being around you, and it's trying to reinforce that by finding the thing that smells the most like you (and where you spend proportionately more of your time than any one spot) - your bed, and peeing on that so that the thing that smells most of you, also smells of MankyCat too.

It's a bit like the fight / flight thing where a poorly socialised cat will roll on its back to let you stroke its belly, which is a friendly / submissive gesture, but then gets nervous that being all relaxed and vulnerable is dangerous, so they grab your hand and claw the shit out of it. Even if you're the reason they're relaxed and trusting enough, being vulnerable by relaxing reminds them of times in the past when that's exposed them to getting beaten up.

It is really fucking annoyimg, but that peeing on your bed thing is classic nervous behaviour, which could be anything in the house itself (like trying to come to terms with the ferrets) or just the result of having been alone too long. If you want to persevere with this cat, then a couple of suggestions would be to (a) make sure you wash your bedlinen and scrub the mattress with biological detergent, because the cat smell is bonded to a fat molecule and if you don't destroy that with bio detergent, it'll just pick up the smell again and remember that it's peed there before, it'll be like a Pavlovian trigger to do it again, even if it's not feeling as nervous at that time.

The other thing you can try is a thing called Feliway, from the vet - it's a kind of cat pheromone spray, which gives off a nice neutral but reassuring "everything is good here" smell to most cats. Works well both to calm down unhappy cats and to disguise other smells (other cats, etc) that might freak them out.

But if what you were nsaying yesterday about some ferret - cat warfare is the case, that might well just be too much stress for the cat to cope with, especially as your house is not its own territory and it may just feel too threatened to ever calm down enough to not just wee incessantly out of fear and trying to mark the place as its place too. Might be kinder to all of you just to pass it on to the CPL?

[graculus.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, having grown up with cats there is very little that phases me about what they can get up to and I'm crosser at myself than him for giving him too many options to do this kind of thing so early on in our acquaintance.

I'm not convinced how the whole ferret-cat thing will go, but also know that manky!cat can't have been very well with the whole infected mouth thing so perhaps if he's feeling a bit better in himself he'll tolerate the weasels more. Or not, we'll have to see. Now if the CPL would only phone me back... ;)

[rivier.livejournal.com]

Hah! I'll stop singing to the choir, then...

[rhade-rad.livejournal.com]

You can also add Rescue Remedy to the cat's drinking water. I did that with my very, very shy kitten and it definitely calmed him down. He still hides from visitors but he doesn't tremble with fear either.

[phantomas.livejournal.com]

Oh but that's the feline way to say "I miss you"...at least, that's what my cat Zorro have been telling me for several years...

[manna]

If it's used to being an outdoor cat, and it has no way to get out of the house, it could stay pretty stressed out for a while. One of our cats was born a farm cat, and it took her a long time to cope with being shut it in any way, even for a very short period of time.