Hi,
Brand new to the site. Our cat of 19 years passed away a few months ago and after a period of mourning, we have just adopted two new kittens (one for each of my daughters, ages 8 and 5). The kittens are from the same litter and one is male (Tiger) and one is female (Fluffy). The animal hospital was not sure of their exact birthdate, but estimate them to about 8 weeks old now.
They have both been using the litter boxes (we set up two litterboxes next to each other) almost all the time, but we have had a couple of incidents and we can't tell if they are just accidents or if there are bigger systemic litterbox issues. They both go poop in the litterboxes pretty much all the time, although we have found a couple of poops on the side of the litter box (even when the litterbox is completely clean, we clean them really often), although the poop was on top of a small amount litter that had gotten outside the box. We don't know which kitten has done that. By the way, we haven't given them full access to the house yet, so they have been primarily in two rooms, so it's an area that isn't too large.
Fluffy has a been doing her poop in the litterbox, but has been peeing outside the litterbox on occasion. We saw her pee on a doormat that was in the room and also on the linoleum floor and also on the wall-to-wall carpet in the adjoining room. Tiger has been better about the litterbox but we also witnessed once where he went pee in a spot where Fluffy had gone earlier, even though we cleaned it thoroughly (including odor remover). How can we correct or train these litterbox issues? I know cats also can get urinary tract infections which impact their litterbox habits, but we've found nothing wrong so far.
The second item is that Tiger is drastically smaller than Fluffy (we've had them both for about 2 weeks). Maybe he's just the runt of the litter, but he eats substantially less and is also much less active and much more lethargic. We've tested him and he came up negative for worms or parasites. Should we be concerned that he's so small? We took him to the vet last week, but we didn't bring Fluffy so the vet didn't see the size difference. He was at 7 weeks last week and weighed only 1 pound. Seems like Fluffy is already pushing 2 pounds.
Thanks so much for any insight.
