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Cleaning Soiled Areas
Because animals are highly motivated to continue soiling an area that smells like urine or feces, it's imperative that you thoroughly clean the soiled areas.

Aversion to the Litter Box
Your cat may have decided that the litter box is an unpleasant place to eliminate if:

• The box is not clean enough for her.
• She has experienced painful urination or defecation in the box due to a medical problem.
• She has been startled by a noise while using the box.
• She has been "ambushed" while in the box either by another cat, a child, a dog or by you, if you were attempting to catch her for some reason.
• She associates the box with punishment (someone punished her for eliminating outside the box, then placed her in the box).

What You Can Do

• Keep the litter box extremely clean. Scoop at least once a day and change the litter completely every four to five days. If you use scoopable litter, you may not need to change the litter as frequently. This will vary according to how many cats are in the household, how many litter boxes you have and how large the cats are that are using the box or boxes. A good guideline is that if you can smell the box, then you can be sure it's offensive to your cat as well.
• Add a new box in a different location than the old one and use a different type of litter in the new box. Because your cat has decided that her old litter box is unpleasant, you'll want to make the new one different enough that she doesn't simply apply the old, negative associations to the new box.
• Make sure that the litter box isn't near an appliance that makes noise or in an area of the house that your cat doesn't frequent.
• If ambushing is a problem, try to create more than one exit from the litter box, so that if the "ambusher" is waiting by one area, your cat always has an escape route.

Surface Preferences
All animals develop preferences for a particular surface on which they like to eliminate. These preferences may be established early in life, but they may also change overnight for reasons that we don't always understand. Your cat may have a surface preference if: She consistently eliminates on a particular texture. For example, soft-textured surfaces, such as carpet, bedding or clothing, or slick-textured surfaces, such as tile, cement, bathtubs or sinks. She frequently scratches on this same texture after elimination, even if she eliminates in the litter box. She is or was previously an outdoor cat and prefers to eliminate on grass or soil.

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