Hi, we got a one year old male cat about a month and a half ago. He's
very sweet and good, but he has a very strange and annoying habit--he
scratches non-stop. It's not the couch or chair or normal things,
though.
When he gets out of the litter box, he'll stay and scratch and cover
his business for five to ten minutes or until we disrupt him. This
cuases a lot of litter to fly out of his box and all over the floor.
It seems his motive is to get all the litter out of the box and onto
the floor.
He does the same with his food. He'll eat without problem but then go
to his food and just begin to scratch at the mat. There's no food on
the mat but he acts as if he's trying to move something from one place
to the next. If he were a human, we'd call this OCD behavior. That
kind of obsessive cleaning of hands.
My question, then, is does this behavior indicate a health problem, a
psychological problem, or is it just a bad habit that we need to train
him out of?
Any help would be well appreciated.