Our youngest cat, Pedro, is driving us bonkers. I’ve taken him to the vet numerous times, and nothing seems to help. He has become a crazy demented old man cat and I am literally losing sleep over him. He is about 16 years old, and shows some early signs of renal failure.
We have two main issues with Pedro. His most disgusting old age issue is he has started spraying things in our house. He gets our curtains at least once a week, and yesterday morning he sprayed into the kids’ toy box. I can’t tell you how crazy this is making me.
Every spray episode involves at least an hour in cleaning work, and it is happening several times a week. At least I finally found a solution that removes the smell. To remove cat urine smell, first douse with vinegar and let it soak for about ten minutes. Rinse off the vinegar and dry up the water. Next, cover the affected area with a paste of baking soda and water. Let it dry completely, then vacuum up. This does wonders to neutralize kitty odor, and even works on mattresses. For the kids toys, I used a bleach bath to clean them up. Anything that can be laundered goes into the washer, and that usually takes the smell out. The vinegar and baking soda even works on my beautiful white marble floors.
Pedro’s most annoying issue, though, is his yowling. He yowls all day and night, but his night yowling is the worst and hardest to tolerate. The night yowling starts at 2 or 3 am and continues until 6 am. It is so loud he wakes up everyone in the house. It is this guttural, loud, desperate kind of sound, and he mostly does it in the hallway outside the kids bedroom! The vet thinks it is age related dementia, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live with. He wakes us up at least five or six times a night, and we are not getting any sleep. We have tried Feliway spray, which helps a bit but not a lot. We plugged in a Feliway diffuser to see if a more consistent dose would help. That was yesterday, and last night the howling was nonstop. I am hoping that in a few more days the Feliway works some magic. I was also reading online that music might help, so tonight we will turn on the music for him. I will also experiment with a night light. I know he has a bit of vision loss and hearing loss, which is probably contributing to the problem.
Does anyone have any advice for us? How do we quiet this cat at night, and stop him from destroying our house with the spray? Our quality of life is deteriorating, and I’m afraid Pedro will soon have to go to kitty heaven if we can’t resolve these issues.
Send him on to the pearly gates. He will thank you for it when you get there.