In addition to being extremely cute, cats are also notorious for being one of the cleaner pets out there. For one thing, they are self-grooming and could spend up to 50% of their waking hours grooming themselves.
This is something that their mother will do for them from the say that they’re born and they will basically copy it with their own tongues. It keeps them clean and also lubricates their fur to get rid of dirt and potential parasites.
And so cats tend to be animals that won’t track a lot of dirt into your home, nor will they smell particularly bad. There is also the fact that cats will naturally gravitate towards the litter box when going to the bathroom.
It’s just part of their instinct to bury their waste so that it doesn’t attract other animals, and this leads them to dirt or sand when they need to go. For most cats, you literally just need to have a litter box present and your cat will know it’s their bathroom without being trained.
So this is a pretty useful, evolutionary trait that cats have and it for sure makes them a very desirable pet, but it’s not exactly foolproof. It’s not unheard of that a cat will sometimes just pee on the floor or on the furniture.
If this does happen, and we’ll talk about what might cause it in a bit, it’s very unfortunate for a number of reasons. The most apparent of which is the fact that cat urine has an absolutely horrendous odor.
As we said, cats don’t normally smell anywhere near as bad as other pets, specifically dogs, but their urine is an awful lot worse if it’s not covered by the contents of the litter box. If there’s cat urine on the carpet, that smell is going to take hold.
The reason why it smells so much worse is because of the fact that the origins of cats can be traced back to desert regions and so they evolved to absorb a significant amount of water from their urine.
This basically means that when they do urinate, it’s a high concentration, much higher than that of a dog’s urine which would be rather diluted. So if you’re dealing with the smell of cat pee on your carpet, what can you do about it?
How to Clean Your Carpet Correctly
The first step is to clean up as much of it as you can with a cloth. The sooner you get to it the better but that’s not always in your control. Just get a clean dry cloth and blot at it for a while to try and soak some of the urine up.
Then use some clean water to give the area a bit of a rinse. You won’t get that much extra but it’s an important step to make sure that the area is actually as clean as possible before you go at it with some stronger stuff.
There are then two primary options for neutralizing the smell which you can try. It might even be worth it to use both just to give yourself the best chance of removing the smell. A mixture of water and vinegar is one option that is effective because vinegar is an acid that can neutralize alkaline salts in dried urine stains.
And then you could also try an enzyme-cleaner. Enzymes are biological catalysts that are usually found in our body and will speed up chemical reactions and are also important for breaking down food in our digestive system.
They will serve a very similar function in terms of the acids and particles present in the urine stains, and even if the stain is dry, a good enzyme cleaner will still be very effective in ensuring that the odor disperses.
Most of the time when you purchase an enzyme cleaner it will come in a spray bottle but spraying might not get the job done, I would suggest that you actually just take the top off it and actually pour some of it on the stain.
Once you’ve done this and you’re sure that the smell is gone, there are more things for you to consider. You need to figure out the reasons why your cat actually peed on the carpet instead of in the litter box in the first place.
There could be a few different causes but the most likely scenario is to do with the litter box itself. You need to clean out the litter box regularly. I would scoop out the litter every single day and do a full, thorough clean of the box once every two weeks.
If the box is too dirty your cat will be able to smell it and they won’t associate it as a place where they’re able to hide their scent, so a dirty litter box will actually just have the opposite effect, it will be a deterrent.
This will of course then leads to your cat just peeing wherever they want. There could also be an issue of stress or anxiety or some other kind of medical issue such as a urinary tract or kidney infection.
So if you have kept your litter box clean and you are still dealing with cat urine in your carpet, then it might be time to take a trip to the vet and just have a conversation about it. If it is something medical it will more than likely be an easy enough problem to solve.
And then once all of that is solved, I would also think about other consequences of cat urine around your home, such as the possibility that it could attract certain pests. Ironically, it appears that mice can be attracted to cat urine.
Depending on how long the problem of cat urine in the carpet persists, you could end up with an unfortunate infestation of mice. If it’s too severe, your best course would be to look for a professional pest control service. But keep in mind that only the serious pros care about your pets and environment.
Hopefully, this won’t be the end result of a little bit of cat pee in the carpet, but it does happen and it’s important to be prepared for all possibilities, so be sure to keep it in mind.
Eliminating the rancid smell of cat pee is not a particularly complicated process, but if you do have cats, you should probably take the necessary steps to just prevent them from peeing on the carpet in the first place.
And the best way to do that is to make sure that you always have a litter box that is clean and easy for your cat to access.
