The End of Litter

In honor of Earth Day (a day late), I’m going to talk about ending litter.

Not the stuff you find on the street or throw from your car window.  I don’t mind that because, on a long enough timeline, everything is biodegradable.  Mother Nature is tougher than I am.  She can handle my McDonald’s wrappers.

No, I’m talking about the real scourge: cat litter.

We’ve got four of the things, and let me tell you, they make poop.  Everyday.  I keep telling my wife that they are going to continue making poop as long as we keep feeding them, but she continues to give them food.

For those of you who don’t know, most cats use a litter box, which is a fun pan full of a sand-like mixture of diatomaceous earth and bentonite clay, which trains your cat to use the neighbor kid’s sandbox if you let the little potsticker go outside.

Thanks for that.

So, everyday, our four cats crap in a couple of pans full of sand. Until the sand pans get too full of cat crap.  Then, they use the couch.

Who decided this was a good system?  Is it a conspiracy of Big Couch to force people to buy new furniture on a regular basis, the way Big Oil suppressed the 1000 mile-per-gallon carburetor, Big Pharma suppressed the cure-all hemlock pill, and Big Sword suppressed world peace during the Dark Ages?

There’s got to be a better way.

Right?

Enter the CitiKitty.  It’s the miracle cat potty trainer featured on The Shark Tank.

Here’s how it works:

1. Move the litter box to the bathroom and start using flushable cat litter.
2. Once the cats are comfortable with that change, put the CitiKitty on the toilet, under the ring and add litter.
3. In a week or two, when all of the cats are comfortable with the setup, pop out the center ring of the CitiKitty.   This gets the cats used to doing their business over water.
4. Every couple of weeks, pop out another ring until the cats are used to standing on the slippery ring and crapping directly into the water.  Praise the cat when it happens, because cats give a crap about your opinion.
5. Throw the litter box away and brag to your friends.

Because I love testing things to make my life easier, and I hate cat crap, I gave the thing a try.

It worked great until step 3.  Apparently, pooping directly into water is similar to trapping a vampire with running water and causes the cats to panic and find somewhere else to poop, never to return to the bathroom.

There’s really nothing better than stumbling into the living room half asleep, turning on the news and flopping onto the couch, only to find a little lump, still warm, under your butt.

Don’t get me wrong, step 2 was a pain in the neck, too.  In order to use the toilet, you have to take the stinking sandbox off of the toilet without spilling litter all over the bathroom, find a place to set it that isn’t disgusting, do your business, put the litter pan back on the toilet, and wash your hands really hard.   If you’re a friend of my son’s sleeping over, it’s easier just to not notice the litter box sitting there and top it off in the middle of the night.

It’s a heck of an idea.  The best execution I’ve seen for getting a cat to crap in the toilet.

But it doesn’t frickin’ work.  If you’ve got a cat using the toilet, I’m guessing you had to sacrifice the neighbor kid to some kind of evil Lovecraftian entity to make it happen, because the CitiKitty didn’t do it.