What Scooping the Litter Box Tells You About Your Cat’s Health

Laurie Anne Walden, DVM

Image by Chris Murphy on Flickr

Cleaning the litter box might not be your favorite chore, but it has a major benefit: it helps you monitor your cat’s health. Some serious illnesses that are common in cats affect their toileting behavior, urine output, and stool consistency. By scooping the litter box a couple of times a day, you can find evidence of these problems much sooner than you would if your cat toileted outdoors.
 
Signs to Watch For
Contact your veterinarian if your cat shows any of these signs:

• Change in frequency of litter box visits
• Urinating or defecating outside the litter box
• Squatting in the litter box without producing much urine (a medical emergency in male cats)
• Crying in the litter box
• Change in size of urine clumps
• Blood in urine or stool
• Change in stool consistency
• Change in stool volume

 
You don’t need to use specialty products like color-changing cat litter (marketed as a health screening tool) to detect problems. If you decide to try cat litter that changes color according to pH or other chemical factors, keep a couple of cautions in mind. First, be sure your cat is willing to use the litter. The right kind of litter is whatever kind your cat is comfortable with. For most cats, this means unscented litter that is scooped daily and replaced regularly. Second, don’t rely on the litter to rule out a medical problem. Color-changing litter can’t be used for diagnosis and might not be accurate even for screening. If your cat shows signs of a problem but the litter’s color indicator hasn’t changed, contact your veterinarian anyway.
 
What Urine and Stool Changes Might Mean
Toileting Behavior
Cats tend to hide signs of illness and pain, so we need to watch for subtle behavior changes as clues to medical problems. Visiting the litter box more often might be caused by increased urinary urgency, increased urine volume, or diarrhea. Visiting the litter box less often could indicate arthritis, other mobility problems, stress, general illness, or competition from other pets. Urinating and defecating outside the litter box have lots of possible medical causes, so don’t assume your cat is just being spiteful (cats don’t feel that kind of emotion).
 
Urine Clumps
When you scoop the litter, pay attention to the size of the urine clumps. Clumps getting bigger over time could mean that your cat’s urine volume has increased. Kidney disease, diabetes, and thyroid disease are all common in cats and cause increased urine volume. A decrease in size or number of urine clumps might mean that your cat is urinating somewhere else in the house. Male cats with urinary blockage (a life-threatening emergency) produce no or very small amounts of urine.
 
Stool
Signs of urinary problems (like straining or frequent squatting in the litter box) can be mistaken for constipation. Cats with constipation produce either small hard stools or no stools. Soft stool and diarrhea are more common than constipation in cats and have many possible causes. If your cat has soft stool that lasts for more than a day, blood in the stool, or small hard stools, contact your veterinarian. Save a sample of stool that’s less than 24 hours old in case your veterinarian needs it for testing.
 
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/134294785@N06/21911087653/

---