DON'T BLAME THE CAT!

Look at the sweet face of this cat. She is as sweet as she looks. The only thing is, she has a problem but it is not of her own making.

Her potty box, a triangular covered box that fits neatly into a corner of our tiny back "porch," has now become a thing of terror for this sweet cat. Why?

A couple of days ago, Jerry was reaching to get a bottle of water which we stored on a top shelf adjacent to the cat's box. He quite accidently hit a can of diet soda with his elbow and sent it crashing down onto the cover of the cat box. It made a god-awful noise.

The cat happened to be inside the box at that very moment and she ran flying out of it like a bat out of hell. Her hair was standing straight up -- she was so scared she looked electrified. He felt awful, of course, and attended to her with much petting, soothing words and apologies.

Did all that make her feel better? Well, she looks a lot better, but since that time she will no long go inside the box. All the cajoling in the world has not made her change her mind. As far as she is concerned, it's a no brainer: you get scared like that and you simply make sure it will never happen again.

The point of the box being covered is twofold: first, she is one of those cats that will dig to China, causing litter to fly everywhere, before the hole is suitable for her, and secondly and most important, she has a strange way of urinating, much more like a male cat spraying than a tidy little "sit" like a normal female cat. We never were able to find a potty box with high enough sides to contain her urine when nature called. I was having to scrub around the box after every one of her trips.

So at the present time we are trying to re-train her to walk into the box. But to avoid her using the carpet in the living room in the meantime, after so many hours we break down and remove the lid, at which point she happily uses the box. Training a cat is almost impossible under ordinary circumstances and retraining one that happened to experience an extraordinary circumstance is -- well, I'm thinking of impossible as being the correct word.

It's really not her problem and not her fault. We just have to wait and see how this situation evolves. Cats are pretty smart, but whether this cat is smart enough to know it will never happen again, I just don't know. What I do know is that if she eventually does use the covered box again, we will certainly move the stored items to a different location!