cat and cat box

Question
My wife and I adopted a cat in Dec. of 2005. She was litter trained when we got her. In the past 4-5 months she has started her urninating right at the edge of the cat box leaving a mess outside of the box. We recently changed to a larger box hoping this would fix the problem, but it did not fix the problem. We have another cat and they have been together since 2005 and have had no problems with sharing. Any help you could give would be great.
Thank You
Richard and Teri


Answer
Richard,

Sometimes cats do things for reasons only they know. What your cat is doing is not common.

If it were me I would try a couple of things to weed out the reason. Try putting the litter box where it us up against something on 2 sides, like in a corner, then put up a short 'fence' on the other two sides where she had to jump over it to get in the litterbox and can't eliminate over the side. Try on even bigger box with deeper litter. Also try using some children's playsand one time instead of litter (get it at Home Depot or other building supply store).

If all else fails it may just be a new quirk of her personality so just put newspapers down around the litterbox and hope for the best.

I am including a couple of links to articles about improper elimination that you may find helpful: (copy and paste, or type the whole links into your address bar)

http://cats.about.com/cs/behavioralissues/a/outsidebox_two.htm

http://www.geocities.com/heartland/pointe/9352/litterboxhelp.html

I hope this helps.
Tabbi