Disclaimer: this technically isn't my cat but her owners (my brother and his girlfriend) let me live with her/them every other week when I'm not at my parent's because I adore her and miss her if I'm away for even a few days.
also this will probably be very long, sorry about that. tl;dr at the bottom
So recently, my brother's gf moved in a few months ago with him, and after getting a lot of renovating and remodeling on the house done, they finally moved forward with bringing her cat into the house. I got really nervous about this because back when me and my brother adopted her at the shelter, her clipboard with her information had the "does not like cats" box checked off. When I asked them about it, they both said that since it was probably a stressful environment for her, that's probably why she didn't get along with other cats.
It's not like they immediately tried to introduce them with no barriers or anything, especially since the gf's cat gets very nervous and spooked easily, so for the first few weeks they kept him in the master bedroom for his safe spot, and used a fence-like barrier so they could see each other and stuff.
It went surprisingly well at this point? I expected my cat, (who we will call "D") to be more aggressive or unfriendly, but she seemed bizarrely chill while my brother's gf's cat, ("R") frequently hissed and made low mrow noises. Eventually this got chalked up to R being in an entirely new and stressful environment with a stranger cat, because the hissing went away, and sometime after that while I was away, they took away the barrier so R could go around the entire house.
For a while, it seemed like it was fine, R stopped hissing at D, and although D got less curious and slightly more aggressive (some swiping and posturing occurred, but no injuries), I thought they were learning to coexist, slowly. I was less optimistic about them being the best of friends, but I was hoping they would at least be cordial to each other?
fast forward a few weeks, and I find out that D has started peeing on bath rugs! She still goes in the litter and the pee on the bath rugs really smells, so we assumed it's because of the new cat, not a UTI, and she's doing it to mark territory. So far, they basically chalked it up to D wanting more attention because of the new cat, and the marking will eventually go away, but it's been weeks, and now she's even peeing on them when I'm not there!
Originally, they thought I might've had something to do with D peeing on the rugs, because of an incident where my brother was playing with R, who roughhouses, and when D saw, she pounced on R and basically attacked him. It's the only fight that I've seen them have, and we think D feels territorial over people, and I'm her known favorite so they thought she was marking because she was being over protective when I came back.
Obviously not the case because it's gotten so bad that she pees on bath rugs pretty much daily now. I still don't think it's an UTI because I've still seen her use the litterbox, and I've asked my brother and his gf about whether they thought about getting diffusers or synthetic pheromones, but they're afraid that if they do, D will start peeing somewhere else, like the carpet that covers most of the house's bedrooms, or very large rugs....
This is really starting to worry me, so I tried looking into it to see if I could figure out why she keeps peeing only on bath rugs and not like on the carpet, and I found out that the rubber non-slip backing can cause cats to pee on it, but before the gf moved in and they did a lot of remodeling+redecorating, the house has had different but still rubber non-slip backings on it for years, and D has never peed on it.
I'm really unsure on what to do or suggest to my brother or his gf, I don't like that they're wasting so much water on washing these same rugs nearly daily, and I'm afraid that this isn't going to go away like we're hoping and that they might end up thinking up giving up one of the cats :(
tl;dr: second cat got introduced into household, cats themselves aren't aggressive with each other, but the original household cat keeps marking on and only the bath rugs nearly daily...advice?
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/gx2bmd/advice_cat_started_peeing_on_bath_rugs_and_wont/
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