Any advice on stopping our cats weeing on baby's stuff?

[arewethereyet]

After three calm weeks of having a new born, our two cats have taken to weeing on or near her things; this has happened both sneakily and completely overtly, with our male cat climbing on to the car seat in front of us yesterday and weeing all over it. The female has also started to rub her feet on any slippy or loose surface in a skiing motion, and we think this is a precursor to the weeing. We have a neutered male and spayed female, both very friendly and quite interested in the baby, and apparently not antagonistic - does anyone have any idea why they have suddenly started this, and how we can stop them? Going slightly mad here.

They are jealous of the baby.

To stop our 3 indoor cats from destroying our house while we were at work, I used to squirt lemon or orange juice on the furniture that I didn't want them on. I've heard that cats don't like the smell of citrus. This may be a baby safe way of keeping cats away from areas you don't want them in. Worked for us.

All the baby stuff is new and alien to them. They are marking it as theirs to ward off any other cats. a solution of surgical spirit (test it first for colourfastness) sprayed onto the cleaned areas, will remove previous smells from attracting them back to it again.

Ask your vet for a hormone spray/plug in to help calm them.

Thanks for the suggestions; we'll try them and see what happens.

Our spayed female cat did this. It was deliberate and she used to wee on soft things like cushions, the sofabed and the baby's car seat or blanket.

The vet checked her over for infection etc, but came to the conclusion it was deliberate and she was marking territory. I thought only males marked, but apparently females can do it too.

I ended up getting her rehomed somewhere with no other pets or children - I was told that she would always do it as she wanted to be the "top cat" and with another cat (her brother) and the baby she could't be the top cat.

ah, not such a happy ending then. I hope we can avoid that. We've bought both cats new toys and tried to give them each dedicated play time, and they haven't weeed in the last few days so we'll see.