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?
Hey, I would try getting him his own litter box. My dogs are litter trained and they miss outside the box too, mostly because the walk while they go. Maybe find a box with high walls to see if that’s the problem. Anyways good luck and please don’t give up on your fur baby. It’s something that you’ll never forget.
We don’t always get what we planned when adding to our family whether it’s with a pet or with a child.
You have to search your heart and ask. “Did we adopt this baby through the good and the bad?”
“Do we want to give up on them when there could be a reason?”
“Are we the type to just give up?”
I too have a home full of animals, I reach the point at times where I feel as though my head is going to explode and I can’t deal with them anymore. But I then look and see how many animals don’t have ANYONE to love them. No one to get upset with them, no one to pet them. I then realize that they aren’t perfect just like my kids, but they love me and i love them and we work through it.
If your cat has been declawed that is a HUGE factor in using the litter box.
Did someone else use it before he got there and you hadn’t had time to clean it… maybe just just doesn’t like to share.
Does the litter smell funny? He might not like it.
Have you recently moved the litter box?
I hope and pray things work out for you both