Do you have multiple, indoor-only cats?  Does one of them urinate seemingly everywhere except the litter box?  Does she hide all the time?  Is she afraid of her own shadow?  Have you been told she has “behavioral” issues?  If so, you may have a beta problem.

                The term alpha is widely known.  It refers to the most dominant member of the clowder.  This cat is the boss, the one to whom all the other cats defer.  But what about the other end of the scale?  That cat is the beta.  The opposite of the alpha, the beta is dominated by every other cat.  While nearly every clowder has an alpha, there is not necessarily always a beta.

                Human servants of multi-cat households face many challenges.  Different personalities, litter boxes strewn all around the house, different medical and dietary needs, and our personal favorite, someone vomiting up a fur ball every single day are but some of these.  While we’ve been blessed with the presence of at least one cat every day of our time on this feline-ruled planet, we were not prepared for the heart-wrenching dilemma we faced with one of our cats.

                As we would eventually realize, we had a beta problem.

                We have eight indoor-only cats, two males and six females, all rescues.  Our alpha is a four-year-old female named Margaret.  She’s the smallest of them all, but is afraid of absolutely nothing.  Our seven-year-old male, Scotty, a big, medium-haired ginger, thinks he is the alpha, but he’s mistaken.  He’s just too dim-witted to know.

                The most timid of our cats is Nala.

             

                Nala and her sister, Chanel, are eight years old, and our home is actually their second.  They were adopted as kittens by a well-meaning family with very young children.  Unfortunately, the children tormented their new kittens without remorse.  By the time the parents of these children realized their error, the damage was done.  As a result, both cats are now extremely shy and afraid of their own shadows.

                We’ve had Nala and Chanel since they were about ten weeks old.   Chanel gets by with no issues and is at least willing to take up for herself, so the other cats usually leave her alone.  Nala, on the other hand, is tormented without end by the other cats, and by Scotty in particular.  She simply will not defend herself.  Such is the nature of what we would soon understand to be a beta.

                Of course, we were not aware of any problem immediately.  By the time we realized something was wrong, we discovered Nala had urinated in several unwanted places.  We had to replace footboards on walls, repair damaged flooring, and throw out several pieces of furniture.  Nala wrecked the house.

                We also realized she spent most of her life in hiding.  Since we fed each cat in a separate location from the others, she would come out to eat, but once the other cats were released after meals, she would go back into hiding, typically under the living room couch.  We rarely saw her at all during daylight hours.  On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being perfect, her quality of life was barely a 1.  The only joy she experienced was at night on the rare occasion when we were able to get her to sleep on a spare pillow above our heads.  Clearly, she felt safe there.  But inevitably, she was forced to “run the gauntlet,” as we called it, when she tried to avoid all the other cats while searching for a place to relieve herself.

                She relieved herself all over the place.

                We tried all of the usual remedies.  The first step was to work with our veterinarian.  We felt there must be a physiological issue with a pharmacological solution.  But testing revealed no infection or medical issue of any kind.  “Happy pills” seemed only to turn her into a zombie and did nothing to solve the problem.  We tried different brands of litter.  We tried lids on and lids off the litter boxes.  We tried placing litter boxes everywhere, in almost every room.  We tried sprays guaranteed to remove stains and odors in the hope Nala would not return to her scent and choose instead to use her litter box.  Nothing worked. 

                By the time we realized the extent of the damage and that she really had no quality of life, our only choices seemed to be either to rehome her, surrender her to a no-kill shelter (never the other kind), or… the unspeakable.

                But who is willing to take a chance on a cat with a known urination problem?  And if we did find someone, how could we be sure they wouldn’t throw her out the door or otherwise mistreat her?  And how could we, and I hesitate to even write this, put down one of the sweetest cats we’ve ever known who, except for the urination issue, is otherwise perfectly healthy?

                Hence our dilemma.

                Finally, at our wits end, we reached out to others for advice.  Linda Hickam of Forgotten Felines in Huntsville, Alabama, and Nadine McConkey of the Madison Animal Rescue Foundation in Madison, Alabama, both had similar experiences with their cats.  Both suggested exactly the same thing.  The solution was simple:  isolation.

                Isolate Nala?  To us, that sounded rather extreme, and perhaps even cruel.  But on the other hand, we had to admit it would be an improvement over her current existence.  So, we decided to give it a try.

                We selected our master bathroom, with its spacious, tiled floor, as Nala’s new private residence.  No other cats are allowed in, and Nala is not allowed out.  A large window provides plenty of sunlight.  She has her own litter box, toys, scratching post, bed, and even a heating pad designed for pets.  While not ideal, it’s much better for her in our view than living in fear under the couch her entire life.  In fact, it seems quite cozy.

                We put Nala in there and crossed our fingers.

                Almost immediately, Nala began to thrive!  Since she has been isolated, she has never once urinated outside her litter box.  Every time we enter the room, she greets us with a trill, rubs against us wanting to be held, and purrs loud enough to rattle the window.  Sometimes we find her sprawled out basking in the sun, happy as a lark.  She watches us do the things people do in bathrooms, and she loves every minute of it.

                Finally, we understood.  Nala is a beta.

                While we (and Nala) are happy to have solved our beta problem, there is one other, perhaps more important, thing we came to realize.  Nala was never the source of the problem.  She had no “behavioral” issue.  The problem was the other cats.  Their behavior toward Nala was the real issue.  All Nala needed was to be separated from other cats.

                So if you find yourself in a similar situation, always begin with your veterinarian.  But you may find you simply have a beta problem.