Litter Retraining?

[Rawr]

Sandy is an old bun (9 years). I’ve had him since he was 1 and he was always great. He wasn’t litter trained by his previous owner, but on Day 2, I saw which spot he liked, installed a toilet there in the cage and voila. Never an issue again.

I’ve brought him to different places too throughout the years whether it’s a friend’s place while I’m on vacation or my SO’s place from time to time. He’s always been 100% solid on pee training. The only thing that he used to occasionally do was to let out a poo explosion all over my SO’s rug (it was kinda funny to wake up to a sea of cocoa puffs). Thank goodness it was dry so we’d pick it up easily. I also remember scolding him about it and he stopped pretty quickly and kept it all in his toilet again. 

Fast forward 6 years. We move to a new place, but he seems to be fine. About a year later (now late 2016 or so) he starts peeing (occasionally) on the floor outside. It might happen once a day at most, and sometimes he’d go for weeks without an issue. We took him to the vet twice who found no issues (no UTI, and did urine analysis). The occurrences were rare enough we’d just deal with it. Clean it up and move on.

It’s gotten worse in 2017 though and recently we switched out his foam mats to just use a plastic mat (those office chair mats) as they will completely protect from any pee. In the recent 3 weeks he’s been basically peeing 100% outside his cage. Let him out for an hour or two and we find 3 pee spots. This is far worse than say when we’d come back from work and find 1 pee spot after a whole day. We keep his toilet in the cage so his mess is contained there, but the minute he comes out he seems to pee. We’ve tried putting all the paper towels in his toilet to no avail.

It’s now such a problem that if he’s outside his cage (he has a large pen area he runs around in), he sits in his pee. His thick fur gets soaked in no time, and it gets infected. So for the past 3 days we decided to lock him in his cage. I know it sounds sad and it’s way too small of an area, but it was either bathe him every day and probably deal with a ton of fur loss on his underside or leave him in an area where if he pees it flows underneath the cage.

We tried that experiment for 3 days, checked the undersides of the cage and there was no pee. He put it all in his toilet. I let him out today and of through the course of dinner and doing a few chores like laundry, he left 3 pee spots and I saw wet footprints around the floor. It’s becoming out of control.

For reference we took Sandy to the vet a few weeks ago and he checked out fine again. Vet said he’s pretty healthy for a senior bun and when asked about his urination habits, the vet said it’s mostly behavioral and suggested to think about him as an old geezer in a nursing home where it can happen often. I’m kinda at a loss and I don’t know what to do at this stage. From an energy standpoint he’s less active than when he was a young bun, but he’s not largely different over the past year. Has plenty of appetite, loves food, digging, etc. This pee habit is just unmanageable though.

[Muchelle]

Being a senior, maybe he either has troubles keeping it in or just feels the urge to go when it’s too late to hop back to the cage. I think you could try to invest in 1 more litter box and place it in his favourite lounging spot outside the cage. If that’s the real problem, he should soon realize he has new bathrooms to go to and efficiently keep himself clean

[Author]

Messages