Kitty Litter

Anyone who has or has ever had a cat can tell you the hardest part about taking care of them is their litter box. Well, maybe not the hardest part, but certainly the most dreaded. Finding a litter that will trap any odors that may pervade the air, and leaves you with two options:

1) Get a litter that actually works at controlling odor.

2) Install a kitty door and put the litter box outside.

We’ve chosen option number one… for now. As your typical cat owners, we had been using the clay variety that claimed to work for multiple cats, because, at the time, we had three. One was an outdoor cat who slept in the garage, and he had his own litter box that he would poop in, but only peed outside. My guess is that he saved up all his urine to spray anything and everything, which is why he was an outdoor cat. The other two were mostly indoor cats who would occasionally step outside for a few minutes, and so we had two litter boxes in the laundry room for them that eventually got moved to the half bath.

Needless to say, multi-cat litter didn’t help, even when we only had the one cat left, and she had two litter boxes to herself. We had tried the clumping variety, which turned out to be the messiest variety, because the sandy particles clumped to the bottoms of the cats feet, and were deposited wherever the cats would go. And, the smell was still ever present. So back to the multi-cat litter, and I would cover the bottom of the litter box with baking soda before filling, and this worked, for a few days. Scooping the poop out didn’t work either, as the smell was coming from the ammonia in the pee, which left us changing out the litter boxes every few days, which also cost us a lot of money.

We had tried every brand and generic, clay, clumping, newspaper, and our last option seemed to be this stuff called Feline Pine. It cost more, but after reading the package, it also said the bag would last 4 months, which left me calculating out the cost of four 20lb bags of multi-cat litter and realizing it would save half. So I figured, what the heck, we can try it. And so I bought it, took it home, cleaned out the litter boxes and filled them both with the recommended amount of litter, and waited to see what our cat thought of it. We had two litter boxes, one covered and one uncovered, because our cat didn’t mind people watching her tinkle, but liked her privacy while she went #2. However, we noticed she wasn’t using her covered box anymore, so we removed it. This new litter seemed to be working! There was no smell except for the scent of pine, and you knew when it was time to change because the pellets broke down to sawdust when wet, which took over 2 weeks.

Since then, I’ve switched to a cheaper brand which works just as well (hey, tight budget when you’re unemployed and your partner is underemployed.) But there are other benefits as well. The poop can be scooped out regularly and flushed down the toilet, which you can’t do with clay and some clumping litters. The byproduct is pine sawdust, which is not only environmentally friendly, but also compostable! Just make sure you scoop out the poo-poo first, as pet and human waste should not be composted, unlike waste from most farm animals, which can.

Eventually we want to keep all of the animal stuff in the garage, putting the cat’s litter box, food and water bowl in there, along with the dog’s food and water bowls. Then we’ll install a cat door to the garage so she can freely go in and out. We also plan on putting the dog kennel back up in the garage so when we have company, doggy can go in there instead of getting in everyone’s way or knocking them over and eating their food as they lie on the hardwood floor bleeding and concussed.