Have you ever tried to train a cat to use the toilet?
This is what I have endeavoured to do over the last year… I should mention, the instructions say 6 weeks!
So it all started because I had decided to bring her overseas with me when I travel to Croatia to run my painting & photography tours. Lets face it, if I am gone for 6 months and someone else is looking after my cat, then she really is no longer my cat. Besides I really love the furry little critter :)
So I figured it would be better if she did not have a litter box. Research on the internet, confirmed that toilet training was a doable and so I decided to try.
I first started out by moving her litter box beside the toilet and then every week I moved the box higher off the floor until it was inline with the toilet bowl. This was easy, she did not make a fuss at all.
I found some kits that you could buy but decided I would try with the do it yourself ideas I had found first. This was not so successful as it was just a piece of cardboard with a hole and you were still suppose to use litter… my cat scratches for China and so you can imagine it was everywhere….she was also confused about the hole.
So I bit the bullet and bought the kit. It sits over the bowl, so it is secure, and has as a little dish about 1" deep, so that it contains the litter you are still suppose to use. Ok, no problem, she is on the toilet, in the dish and doing her business.
So then, every week you are suppose to remove a piece of the dish… there are perforated disks that you just pop out. Technically, 6 weeks later you have a cat using the toilet.
Alas this was not the case….If your cat gets confused then you need to slow things down. I should mention that I thought my cat was pretty smart, I mean I taught her to sit and give a paw before I feed her…it might have taken 3 days. I am not sure how much I slowed things down but like I said, it has almost been a year!
So this toilet thing was not going smoothly. She seemed to always have her feet in the dish and not on the toilet seat, so as the disks were removed you would think she might get the idea that her feet could move forward onto the seat… umm no…. do you know how hard it is to catch your cat using the toilet, so that you can grab her feet and move them into position? once she learns what your intentions are, she literally waits until I leave the house to go!
I suppose I should give her credit where credit is due…. she was a peeing queen! no problems there. But pooping was another story… good thing my floor is covered in tile…. she might have been at a 50% success rate. But then when we got to removing the last disk and removing the plastic tray completely, she completely lost it… like I said, good thing my floor was tile.
So to end this long story, I have given up. She has her litter box back and is scoring 100% on accuracy.
I leave for overseas soon and she will not be toilet trained…. perhaps she thinks that all the other training, like driving around in the car in a crate to get used to motion, or sleeping in her crate for 8-10 stretches, will also stop. Boy is she going to get a fright when that plane takes off! Perhaps the toilet will not look so bad after all?
