# cat peeing on my bed



## rachmc88 (May 8, 2015)

Hi  I have three cats two are brother and sister who are 3 years old, the other is 1.5 years old. They all got on and within a few days of getting the third cat they were all snuggling up together. But Every few months the youngest cat will pee on our matress, she gets under the cover and pees. Other than that She uses the litter tray like normal, it gets cleaned out twice a day and completely cleaned every week. I'm not sure what to do or why she is doing it, how can we get her to stop?


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## chillminx (Nov 22, 2010)

Hi there and welcome to Pet Forums

I'm assuming for a start that all your cats are neutered or spayed?

One reason your little one could be peeing on your bed might be that she has intermittent feline cystitis. Cats use urine to scent mark their territory so it could be your young one is scent-marking your bed as her territory because she feels insecure or anxious. Beds are popular places for cats to scent-mark.

Even though you say all your cats get along fine, there may well be subtle ways in which one or the other (or both) of your older cats are making the young one feel insecure.

Feline cystitis can cause a cat to associate using the litter tray with pain or discomfort so they avoid the tray (for peeing in) and seek out something soft to pee on elsewhere in the house. This may be intermittent or constant, and the cat may use the tray fine for pooing in.

Also if you do not get rid of every vestige of the smell of urine, your cat will keep going back and peeing in the same place. Sheets can be laundered at 60 degrees to get rid of the smell, but it is not easy to rid a mattress of the smell, and I have known people who have had to replace the mattress with a new one when their cat had peed on it! 

Best thing is take the mattress off the bed, lean it against a wall in a warm room (with access denied to the cats), then scrub the mattress with a solution of bio laundry liquid. Even then there is still a chance the urine will have soaked through to the inside of the mattress where you can't clean it.

Once the mattress is dry, ensure you have a waterproof mattress cover to put over it to protect it. There are some which are non-rustling, and comfortable to lie on. Here are some examples from John Lewis:

http://www.johnlewis.com/search?Ntt=waterproof+mattress+covers&Nty=1&_requestid=17237427

It is very important to provide enough resources for cats living in a multi-cat household like yours so the cats are not forced to share if they don't want to. Resources are:- enough food bowls for 3, enough water bowls for 3, enough litter trays for 3 and plenty of cat beds, high up perches (e.g. cat trees, shelves or tops of cupboards).

How many litter trays do you provide for the 3 of them? If they are 'indoor only' cats the rule of thumb is *one tray per cat plus one extra *for good luck. This means you need *4 large trays *and they need to be spread around the house, not grouped together. If the cats go outdoors to toilet most of the time then you could cut back on the number of trays to perhaps two e.g. for mostly night time use..

What I suspect could be happening is one of your other cats is subtly blocking your young cat from using the litter tray to pee in. I would suspect the other female cat, but it could be both of them. There is nothing mean about such behaviour, it is a cat's natural instinct to protect its resources from outsiders. The fact is the young one is an "outsider"" as far as the other two cats are concerned because they are related to each other and have been together all their lives. If this is what is happening it will be making your young cat anxious and she will seek out places to put her own scent (of urine).

Feed your young cat in a separate room to your other two cats, or feed her at a different height, e.g. a table or shelf if you don't want her on the worktop say.
This will make her feel more secure, less likely to become stressed or anxious by the presence of the other two..

Just in case it is a cystitis problem, perhaps stress-related, don't feed her any dry food, as she needs plenty of liquid in her diet and that is best given in her food as nature intended for cats. So feed her a wet food diet and add a little water to her meals too. This will mean her urine is less concentrated, and there will be a greater volume, so it will encourage her to pee more often, which is a good thing! Peeing more often means her bladder is being flushed out more frequently so there's less chance for tiny crystal-like deposits to cling to the bladder wall and cause an irritation.

But of course encouraging her to pee more means you must as I mentioned, provide plenty of litter trays around the house (4).

There is a sticky thread on the board on house soiling cats which you may find useful to read. It is quite long, but is well worth a read. It is written by one of the vets on the forum.

http://www.petforums.co.uk/threads/...ouse-this-is-the-house-soiling-thread.371806/


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