Cats gone Walkabout

We used to have an issue with our cats pee-ing in inappropriate locations. We don't seem to have that problem anymore. and No, we did not get rid of them.

In order to keep them safe, and to reduce our vet bills, Annette and I had determined to keep our cats indoors. This would have worked, except for the fact that two of our cats were strays before becoming ours, and our third one had gotten out of the house a couple of times.

They all knew the joy of being outdoors. They were well aware of the existence of other cat-like beings outside the walls of the house, and they especially knew about those flying feather toys that make chirpy-chirpy noises. As such, they decided to register their complaints.

Unfortunately, they registered their greivences in a language only cats speek. They were pissed, and pissing, but we just didn't get it. Every time we found a puddle that clearly (to a cat) proclaimed their need to go outside, we would round them up, stick their noses in it, and scold them.

We eventually decided that there were too many indoor only cats for the space we had in the house. We experimented by having Nougat, our oldest, biggest, most mentally stable cat (is there such a thing?) outside for extended periods of time. This seemed to help for a while, but suddenly, there was an increase in inappropriate pee behavior.

I thought that perhaps the two cats that were left inside really hated each other, and without Nougat as a buffer, they were expressing it by marking territory. I remembered that Nasa came up with the idea of having 3 astronauts in space capsules because they believed that the third person would keep the other two from killing each other on the long trip to the moon. It occurred to me that we might have a problem, so I scuttled Nougat's Extra Household Activities while we went back to the drawing-board.