Marty takes us to school on understanding blocked cats.

“Cats have a very serious medical condition when they cannot urinate. And you can only imagine how A, painful, and B, dangerous, that is, for cats, and it's almost always male cats. I can tell you, I can count on one hand the number of female cats I've seen obstructed, but male cats, pretty commonly. It accounts for about 3 % of all veterinary hospital admissions, so it is a common disorder.

“If you have a cat that's urinating inappropriately, male or female, blood in the urine, not in the litter box, straining to urinate. It can look like constipation also. Clients think this is a bladder infection, but cats don't get bladder infections the way that other species do.

“People think that their cat missed the litter box. Cats don't miss. If you watch them in the litter box, they dig a little hole and then they turn around and they look and then they dig a little bit more and then they look a little more and then they dig a little bit more. And then when they finally urinate or have a stool, it is nailing it right where they dug the hole. So cats don't miss.

“If they're not using the litter box, you absolutely, positively are getting the advanced notice from your cat that ‘I'm gonna be in trouble and you need to get this fixed fast before something goes wrong.’”

The Marty & Laura Show is produced by Pure Dog Talk Inc., with sound design and editing by Premium Audio Services.