The Litterbox Diaries

Do you remember "Pee-meister" the cat?  I gave him this name when I caught him peeing in the dry food bowl.  I set up a special litterbox in our master bedroom just for him so he could poop and pee without the other cats bothering him.  We kept the door closed because all the other cats wanted to use that new litterbox, and Pee-meister (a very vocal cat) would sit at the closed door and meow until we let him in.

The reason Pee-meister stopped using the other litterboxes was because he was being tormented by NervousCat.  The next chapter in this saga is that NervousCat started to torment GentleSimba.  That's when we found poop on our daughter's bed and poop and pee in an open cardboard box that had candles in it.  GentleSimba, too, needed some other place to go.

So I assembled a litterbox from a plastic storage box and shredded newspaper in it.  This turned out to be wildly popular, and I was changing newspaper sometimes twice each day!

The peeing and pooping in inappropriate places was solved.  But this solution was not good for the long term.  First of all, someone had to be home most of the day to let Pee-meister into the master bedroom.  Second, shredding fresh newspaper and replacing the old took a lot of time.  Third, the scoopable clay litter was terribly dusty, so everything in the master bedroom quickly became covered with dust.  But worst of all was that the cats sometimes would fail to squat before peeing; they would shoot pee on the hardwood floors, which are now horribly stained.

So we changed things around yet again.

First, we replaced the run-of-the-mill rectangular box in the master bedroom with a Booda Clean Step Litter Box, which we figured would contain the dust and prevent errant streams of pee from hitting the floor.  And we eliminated the dusty scoopable clay litter.  We filled it instead with World's Best Cat Litter, a fairly low-dust-producing scoopable litter.  And lastly we kept the bedroom door open so that Pee-meister didn't have to meow his way in.  But the box was a bit too small for GentleSimba.  He wouldn't bother to walk all the way inside, so his pee ran down the ramp and spilled onto the floor.  So we put a sturdy piece of plastic topped with newspaper under the ramp.  If you can't contain the pee, at least confine it to one spot that can be well-protected.

Then we made a new large litterbox from a 90-gallon storage container and set this up in the office.  I cut a U-shaped opening on one of the narrow sides for easy entry.  We filled it with Naturally Fresh scoopable litter, which is made from walnut shells.  This is another low-dust-producing litter.  Dust is especially bad in the office -- it will get into the printer and computer and cause early failure.  As I expected, streams of pee occasionally came out through the U-shaped hole.  But I was prepared this time with sturdy plastic topped with newspaper.

I decided we should use a low-dust litter in the laundry room, too.  This area in the basement houses our washing machine and clothes dryer, plus the boiler and well pump.  We hang clothes there to dry, too.  All the dust from the clay litter has been getting into the armatures and bearings of all the motors, and getting on the clothes.  I chose the World's Best Cat Litter for this only because it's available not just in the pet store but also in all the supermarkets we shop at.

There is one cat that continues to use the clay litter exclusively, so I wonder if we'll be able to eliminate it completely.