The Miller Place

Left to right: Toonces, Moki, Samantha and Precious.

Toonces is a 13 year old male, 18 pounds and almost dog-like in behavior. He’s an indoor-outdoor cat with battle-scars to prove it. He’s been with us most of his life and is an incredible cat. But he marks. Inside. We’ve been cleaning up oderless (to us) dribbles for years and really fussed at him whenever we caught him in the act. With the you-must-really-hate-me addition of three eight-week old kittens last August, his marking has gotten worse.

Moki, Samantha, and Precious are litter-mates, born around July 4, 2002 to a stray Siamese female and unknown fathers. They are indoor-only cats and have distinctly different personalities. Moki’s a pistol and not at all shy with strangers (he’s also the only one that retained Siamese points). Samantha is the best athlete, loving, and likes to play with her nerf golfballs. Precious is scared of anything new and hides when strangers are in the house, but when things are quiet, as is the norm for an empty-nest house, she can demand all of your attention.

Toonces no longer thinks we hate him, of course, and still gets at least at much attention as he did before the kittens came in (maybe more, from overcompensating). There is no longer any outright animosity between them, but Toonces just tolerates…he doesn’t interact with them very often. He has sorta-kinda played a few times with them, so there is hope on that front…

Now the real problem: this morning, Moki decided it was time to stake out our bed as his. And he doesn’t just dribble: right in front of me, he hosed down the bed-skirt, not even realizing it was wrong. Sigh. Two neutered males marking out territory in our house is a problem. We have the cat-oder-neutralizing spray and the pet-stay-off spray, and will agressively use them both to clean up and re-mark-as-ours every spot they hit. I’ve considered superglue and corks, but that probably isn’t such a good idea… Any other suggestions aside from beating the snot out of them, which any cat ‘owner’ will tell you makes things worse, not better?