"I decided to be happy with a litterbox"
How I did it: I joined the yahoo cat toilet training group and fit a bowl into the toilet for the "disappearing litter container" method suggested by the group. The cat used the bowl perfectly, but after several months of efforts (inconsistent because of my travels and new foster cats), I lost interest in getting him trained for a few reasons:
1. Toilet training might not be permanent and might cause other problems. I read many posts on the yahoo group about cats who never had litterbox problems before and developed them after their owners started trying to change their habits. These cats started going to the bathtub or behind furniture, and it became a whole game for owners to block off access to all the alternative locations to make the cat use the toilet. It sounds like some cats just don't like the toilet, so will take any opportunity to avoid using it. Toilet training seemed really tenuous for some cats: in one case, an owner had their cat trained for over a year but then went out of town, leaving her son with the cat. She came back to a smelly, dirty house. [She just wrote to me on this site saying that it was only 2 months, and that the cat would have gone outside the box when she was on vacation anyhow because all cats get stressed when their owners go on vacation. I recall other situations that were similar, however.]
2. It made the bathroom gross. Every time a guest wanted to use the toilet I would have to go into the bathroom beforehand to remove the cat's litter bowl and then after they were done using the bathroom, I had to go back to replace it. Plus, no matter what I did, litter went everywhere: all around the toilet on the floor, around the toilet seat, encrusted in the toilet bowl, and all in hard to reach places. I hated to make guests deal with that. The guy I was dating at the time, I noticed, stopped using the bathroom at my house. Once I got to the stage of putting holes in the litterbowl, it would be even worse because litter obviously goes through the hole.
3. It was time-consuming. It seemed unhealthy to think so much about my cat's toilet habits so that I had to clean the litterbowl every time the cat used it and stay aware of how often he used it.
4. I keep foster cats, a new cat every month or so, and I go away frequently, and it got complicated.
So I gave up. I would like to think that my cat would be one of the cats who transitions effortlessly to the toilet, but I really don't want to discover that he's the kind of cat who starts peeing everywhere else and then never uses a litterbox perfectly again.
Lessons & tips: Here are the details of what I actually did. After much hunting, I bought a $2 bowl at Walmart that fit into the
toilet perfectly. The cat used the bowl perfectly, so the next step
was to cut a hole into the bowl as per the "disappearing litter
container" method suggested on the group. This bowl was a slightly soft plastic, so cut easily with a hot knife (junky knife stuck over a gas burner until hot), though the hole was uneven. When it came time to try to
cut the bowl, I discovered that the bowl was too deep so toilet water
seeped into the bowl as soon as it went into the toilet.
At
Walgreen's I found another bowl that both fit into the toilet and was
shallow enough that it cleared the toilet water so that holes could be
made in the bowl. It was a $2 Melamine bowl and is what is called on
the yahoo group a "holiday bowl." This was when I lost interest in toilet training. Especially since I have no idea how to cut melamine safely. I don't know if a hot knife would do it.
Resources: 1. Yahoo cat toilet training group.
2. Flushable litter (Cat's pride brand).
3. "Holiday bowl"
Btw, I had a really long comment to this entry that said (among many other things) that I was "trashing" and "lying about" the yahoo toilet-training group. I've reread this entry, and I see very little about the yahoo group much less anything critical of it. Obviously this entry really bothered someone, and I find that strange.
Sep 02, 01:49PM PDT
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