If you read the previous post, you are probably wondering what on earth inspired our cats to start peeing and spraying. In addition to entering incidents in the “Kitty Pee Pee Log,” we set up USB cameras in choice locations to figure out who the culprits were. We identified Sookie as the horizontal urinator, and Merlin, Yoshi, and Krishna as the sprayers. We also started looking around the house and thinking about what would make our cats freak out so badly. All incidents occurred on the first floor, so we focused on what might have changed on the first floor.

Here’s the list of possible triggers:

Stray cats in the yard – Stray cats in the area are a classic trigger for territorial marking and spraying. In the late fall, a male orange and white cat started wandering around our yard and spraying the bushes in the front of the house and likely elsewhere. A female black cat appeared around the same time, and she’d sit on the platform bird feeder. Our cats could watch her through the back hall windows. Our home has floor to ceiling windows in most rooms. I could have pulled down all the blinds and put something across the back windows, but with winter in full swing, I didn’t think my mood could handle that much natural light deprivation. Plus removing the view a stray cat outside would not remove the smell. Outdoor stray cats are part of life on the hill.

A litter box switch – In November, we decided to move the upstairs Litter-Robot to the back hall and move the back hall litter box to the upstairs. We did not remove a litter box or switch litter. The same corners had litter boxes, just different types. The Litter-Robot got more heavy use downstairs, which we loved, but we worried that the switch might have been a trigger, so we swapped them back into their original locations.

Christmas decorations – We put up our Christmas decorations the weekend before Thanksgiving and used the same decorations as previous years. We did store them differently this past year. Instead of storing them in the cellar or a second-floor closet, we stored them in the attic. We did not notice any signs of mice or anything different in the attic, but maybe just the space imbued a different scent. The day after Christmas I put away all the decorations. If they were a trigger, I wanted them gone asap.

A shopping bag – Yes, you read that right. A shopping bag! Around Thanksgiving, I took a shopping bag over to Mom and Dad’s house. The bag sat on the floor in their kitchen, and all four of their cats rubbed on it. I brought it back to the house the following week and put it on a chair in the hall. A couple of weeks into the cat drama, we noticed that the bag and chair cushion were soaked in urine. It was an obvious target, but was it the trigger? We threw out the bag, cleaned the chair cushion and put it away in the laundry room, and moved the chair frame upstairs (after wiping it down very well).

Construction blasting – This might seem odd, but I’ll explain. Yoshi is terrified for thunderstorms. He runs (while growling) and hides. It’s cute, but also sad. Sookie flattens herself on the the next to the top step in the stairwell during a thunderstorm. Central Motor Wheel of America (CMWA) is a factory on the same hill ridge where we live. They’ve been working on expansion, and since the ridge is solid rock, they have had to blast through the rock to build their new structure. They blasted for about three months, wrapping up recently (I think), in the late afternoons. The whole house would shake with each blast, and I wondered if our cats perceived this disturbance to be a thunderstorm or something like it. Like thunderstorms, we couldn’t control the blasting so if it was a trigger we’d have to manage the response not the trigger itself.

Krishna’s aggression – Over the last few months, we have noticed that the once brave Sookie has been more timid. We also have noticed more aggressive behavior from Krishna. In the late fall, Krishna developed a habit of coming upon Sookie while she was sleeping deeply and attacking her. Sookie would wake up terrified and hissing, and she’d run out of the room and hide. We don’t know if Krishna’s aggression is response to other triggers or if his aggression itself is the trigger, at least for Sookie.

Radha’s newly-found boldness – Radha has spent the entirety of her life in our home as the target of bullying. Sookie, Pickles, Shady Lady, and Yoshi frequently beat her up. Oddly, Krishna feared her. Merlin, Thelma, and Louise seemed to have neutral feelings toward her. Radha lacks social skills and comes across as abrupt and aggressive rather than playful. She spent most of her time hanging out by herself in one half of our sun porch with some trips into the den to hide under couches or hang out with her humans. As the weather got cooler this fall, Radha spent less time on the sun porch and more time in the main part of the house. She also started wandering into areas of the house where she never ventured on her own such as the kitchen, back hall, guest bedroom, and dining room. She used litter boxes that were new to her. She ate at food bowls shared by other cats. She even started wandering upstairs on her own (through the dreaded Pickles gauntlet). Did Radha’s newly-found boldness set off the cat drama? With cats, it could be anything, and inter-cat drama is a frequent source of anxiety. Cat communities resemble high school with all the cliques and high-emotions that go with it.

Needless to say, we never figured out the trigger, and it’s possible it was a combination of triggers. We removed the triggers we could remove and got to work on mitigating the triggers we could not remove.