When Do You Admit The Relationship With Your Pet Isn’t Working Out?

I’m an avid pet lover. I love animals. Any shape, size, whatever. I dig animals. I probably should have been a zoo keeper, but I made other life decisions. Which means that my house is comfortably full of animals. We capped our limit at six, some have fur, others don’t. And, as one does, I belong to a lot of animal lover groups, loops and meet-up’s.

There was this one morning a few months ago when a regular group member came into our cat lover coffee meet-up. It was clear this person had been crying. I cringed.

When Do You Admit The Relationship With Your Pet Isn’t Working Out?

“Cat pee on your wallet again?”

“No. We made the decision to give our cats to different family members. We…have no cats.”

At this point there was a lot of stunned silence, looks, followed by hugs.

Being a pet lover doesn’t always mean your pet loves you back.

A couple years ago I had to have an emergency surgery done. At the time I was also on the hunt for a new cat. I’d lost three cats fairly quickly, two to old age and one to a birth defect that didn’t surface until he was two. It was devastating and I needed a new cat. I found this gorgeous Russian Blue-Maine Coon mix. The cat was a beast. Huge. Regal. Loved me. Hated everyone else.

We had him twenty-four hours.

He pooped on every available furniture surface in the house the moment I wasn’t there, because I’d gone into the hospital, yanno, on an emergency.

These weren’t I’m-sick-and-need-help poops. These were rage poops. This cat hated the rest of my family the moment he laid eyes on them and wasn’t afraid to let them know. In a big, stinky way.

I’ll never forget coming out of surgery and the first thing I hear is, “The cat shit everywhere. How do I get that stuff out of the rug?”

We were thankfully able to place the cat with a rescue and give them very detailed information to better rehome him. It broke my heart. I wanted to love that cat. I wanted him to be my buddy. My furry-soul mate. But it wasn’t meant to be. At least in this situation we were able to assist in him finding a better, loving home.

But what do you do, when like my coffee friend, you’ve had a long, hard battle trying to make an animal love you and fit your home? We don’t all have a Jackson Galaxy around to solve our pet nightmare situation.

I ask because we’re in one of those quandaries now.

For the last two years we’ve struggled with one of our three cats pooping out of the box. The poor dears have been vet checked and observed until our only explanation is that one of them just doesn’t like litter boxes, no matter the shape, size or material in the box. He’d rather poop on the tile right behind the box.

Me being me, I say we soldier on. These cats love us, we’ve chosen each other, we deal. But how do you ask others, who maybe don’t love the animals quite so much as me, to handle it? Where’s the line? What would you guys do?