Why Is My Cat Peeing Outside Its Litter Box?

Hey, guys, My name is Dr. Lara here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital. Today I'm here with this little black cat. His name is Jet. And Jet is here today because he's been urinating outside the house or outside his bathroom, which is obviously the litter box. Now, when we have patients, specifically cats, that are urinating outside the litter box, we call that feline urinary tract disease. And so feline lower urinary tract disease is just a description of symptoms. Those symptoms can include, but not be limited to just urinating outside the box. Could also be looking at the preputial area or the penile area, the genital area, frequently. Could potentially even be blood in the urine. Could be straining to urinate, could be going to the litter box more frequently. That's pretty much everything that kind of encompasses feline lower urinary tract disease. And so when he came in to me today, you know, he had been urine, he's been urinating outside the box. He's not doing it all the time. And so one of the things that mom and dad had described was he normally sleeps in the bed with them and something had happened where he wasn't able to be in the same room as mom and dad, dad for a few days. And shortly afterwards he urinated outside the box. So one would think there's a very high likelihood that this could potentially be a behavioral issue, what we call inappropriate elimination. And so before we go ahead and go down the road of saying, hey, this is a behavioral issue, we need to go ahead and rule out whether or not he's got something causing this, physiologically speaking. So the main things that we have on there, on that list, it's relatively short, is one, some sort of urinary tract infection. So a bacteria of some sort, usually urinary tract infections, is going to be less common in males than females because males have a longer urethra. So it makes it more difficult for the bacteria to ascend up into their bladder. Two could be some sort of crystals, which is usually an accumulation of minerals that for whatever reason, their body is not eliminating the way that it should. And so it kind of forms into these crystals in the bladder. Three could be some sort of bladder stones. There's four kinds of bladder stones, two of which will show up on X rays, all four of which will show up on ultrasound. Four could be some sort of stress induced cystitis, which is just like an inflammation of the bladder wall and potentially tied to stress. The last is some sort of cancer. Now, normally cancer is very low on the list. That's why it's also the last thing that I just mentioned. And in this particular case, what you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna wanna start off with a urinalysis, which is where we go ahead and take a look at the urine under the microscope and see if there's any evidence of red blood cells or white blood cells, things that could be a clue for indications of inflammation. And then we go on to other stuff, depending on how that they respond to treatment and also how aggressive mom and dad want to be in terms of diagnostics or testing. So if you guys have any questions about this particular video, leave it in the comments. If you found this video helpful, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and share. Thanks for watching. Have a great day. If you have any questions about the treatment also, hit me up. All right, have a great day and thanks for watching.