Male Cat Spraying

by Michael
(London)

Cat territorial confrontation, copyright Sheila Steele (Creative Commons)

Male cat spraying is a very useful form of communication, both short and long term, for a cat.

There's lots of information on the internet about how to stop cats doing what, in fact, comes naturally to them, namely, spraying.

It is firstly useful to remind ourselves that neutering your cat will reduce spraying. Neutering should be a standard process.

It may also help to remind ourselves that urine spraying is a problem for humans but not for cats. A lot of sites talk about spraying as a problem. We need to understand our cat's behavior and work with it rather than against it.

We don't try and change out girlfriend's behavior and if we do we'll fail and lose her (and vica-versa). We accept the behavior of others provided it is reasonable.

To a cat, urine spraying is more than reasonable, it is an essential and highly useful form of non-vocal communication that we, as humans, can't match.

Of course urine spraying is communication through scent. Cats have great noses and use their sense of smell more than we do.

Spraying on a prominent object will leave a long term form of communication that both tells a cat that another cat is about and when he was about. In other words it provides a record (as good as a written record) of another cat's movements.

We are still not sure as to all the functions of leaving scent through spraying. But here are some:

deterring another cat onto his territory

enhancing the cat's confidence of being in a particular area

urine scent is particular to each cat so provides a marker as to who is around

sprayed urine has a different scent to "normal" urine

fresh spray sends a "red stop light" signal to keep out or face confrontation

old spray scent provides a "green go light" that other cats can enter the area without confrontation

female spraying can give indications to a tom cat as to her sexual receptiveness

In addition when feces are left unburied it indicates the cat is not subservient and is boss cat, while burying feces (more normally encountered for humans) indicates that the cat is subservient (to the human carer).

Lets remind ourselves that we need not think of a cat's normal behavior as a problem or bad; just different (and sometimes better) than our behavior and we should try and fit in.