Cat smell in my bedroom - How can I get rid of it?

I've lived with both dogs and cats since the 1940s, as well as parrots and various other species. We've rescued our share. (Same was true of my first marriage and my various stints of living alone.) We love them like our children, since they actually are our children. Between our homes on the two coasts we now have ten dogs and more birds than I can count, although we haven't had any cats for about 20 years.

I've never once heard a cat announce his need to go potty, day or night. Although I've only ever had one cat who had a problem peeing in the house, and he was a rescue with a bad behavior problem and had cystitis so bad that it wasn't curable and he eventually died from it. Obviously that's why he ended up where I found him.

One of my current dogs is so sweet she thinks she's made of sugar and will melt if she gets wet. Even in the daylight, if it's raining hard she'll quietly sneak off into the kitchen to pee on the floor rather than scratching at the doorway to that horrible alien planet where water so cruelly falls from the sky. I've learned to toss her out against her will periodically when it's raining but still she occasionally does it in the house. I tried her on Puppy Pads, which didn't quite suit her fancy. We finally reached a (temporary, I swear) compromise with a kitchen floor mat that's made of very soft plastic with lots of grooves, so it's comfortable to walk on, contains all the urine, and can be washed clean in a few seconds in the laundry sink.

 

My father had a similar problem with his dog at one point. He bought a rain-coat for the dog, and put it on the dog. This happened once, and only once. The dog, it seems, objected to the rain-coat more than it objected to going out in the rain, and never gave him trouble again.

 

Statistically very unlikely that my wife, my ex-wife, and a series of girlfriends who shared my home (all but one of whom were also cat lovers) would also not have been "paying enough attention."

You're the only cat lover I've ever talked to who reports hearing a cat scratching like a dog (or whining or barking or staring or noodging or running back and forth or whatever) to go out. I'll take your word for it but it doesn't seem to be a universal phenomenon, or even a common one.

 

Interesting. As I said, I've only ever had one cat for whom it was an issue and he was utterly hopeless due to problems I unknowingly inherited from someone who abandoned him. So we've never had any reason to think about having to train a cat to do this.

I guess I've had fourteen cats, but I'm older than practically everybody here. Probably 25 dogs. And more birds than that--at least ten different species plus a couple of hybrid macaws. (I have a complete list of all of them, but not on this computer).

I'm sure next time I go home to our spread in California there will be a capybara lolling in the pond.