How to clean up after your pet in the house

Every pet owner's been there: you enter a room and find a small, unpleasant, smelly surprise left for you by your beloved furry friend. But how can you get rid it? Worry not: here are our top tips for cleaning up after your pet in the house.

Accidents will happen, not just with puppies or older pets that are losing control. Even the best-trained pets can have a mishap. Follow these steps to clean up:

For the next pet-poo accident, be prepared: Store a pet clean-up kit in your broom cupboard or utility room. Keep paper towels, bin bags or poo bags (for disposing of solids and used paper towels), a sponge and the enzymatic cleaner in your kit.

If it’s fresh, soak up the liquid with a paper towel. Then lay a thick layer of paper towels on the spot. Cover the paper towels with newspaper, being careful not to let the newsprint rub off on the carpet. Stand on the padding for a couple of minutes. The pressure will help the towelling draw up the liquid. Do this again with fresh paper towels.

Next, saturate the spot with an enzymatic odour-removing cleaner. This type of cleaner even works on old, dried urine stains. Rinse the area by spraying it with clean water and blotting up the water with paper towels.

Avoid using fragrant cleaners, such as shampoos, soaps, or vinegar, to clean the rug. The scents, like the scent of the pet’s own urine, might draw the pet back to the same spot to urinate again.

You don’t always find the puddle when it’s fresh. Often a pet will sneak into a room, relieve itself, and sneak back out again. You may know nothing about it until you follow your nose, and by then the puddle may be dry and—if it’s a dark rug—invisible. To stop your pet from repeating this behaviour, you’ll need to remove the old urine, which means you must know where it is.

To find it, try this trick. Turn out all the lights in the room, then use a black light to illuminate the old urine stains. A black light is an ultraviolet light that makes some compounds, including some in urine, glow in the dark. Outline the stains with chalk or string, so you can locate them when you turn the lights back on, then clean the area as you would a fresh stain.

Dogs and cats are territorial, but they don’t post signs to mark a spot as their own: they pee on it. They’ll do this outside on a tree or inside, where they can ruin floors and carpets and create foul odours. There are several things you can do to stop them—the most basic is to completely remove all traces of urine from the spot they’ve chosen to mark.

After you’ve soaked up fresh urine using paper towels, take the paper towels to your pet’s designated bathroom area, such as a litter box or an area of the garden outside. Take your pet to the spot and let it smell the urine there.

If the pet continues its habit, consider using a deterrent, available at pet stores. These are usually strong-smelling substances that you sprinkle on the area a pet is marking. Some are stronger—and more offensive to humans in the house—than others.

If it’s your cat, and it suddenly won’t use the litter box, it may be that it is reacting to change. Did you recently buy a new brand of litter? If so, switch back to the familiar brand. Is the box dirtier than usual? Clean it. Do you have a new cat that is sharing the litter box? Consider getting another litter box.