Toilet Training My Cats - Part One

How to toilet train your cat (or cats).

I am toilet training my cats. These ones. It's working. I think.

My husband and I have an apartment in Brooklyn which is, well, not as tiny as our previous apartments, but not exactly Beyonce and Jay-Z's penthouse at Grand Army Plaza. For years, we've half-heartedly joked about potty-training the cats to avoid having the icky smell of litter in our home. We've all seen Meet the Parents, right? In case you haven't, Robert DeNiro's cat Jinxie knows how to use the toilet. The movie contains several scenes you might not think could actually take place in real life, but it turns out the cat using the toilet is not one of them!

We watched some "how-to's" on YouTube and it all seemed very complicated. Then, one day, we discovered the CitiKitty Toilet Training Kit for under $30, right there on the internet with all the news and celebrity bikini photos and everything. We bought it. Oh yes, yes we did. To add to the awkwardness of this, I had it sent to work:
The CitiKitty kit sits on top of your toilet bowl, under the seat. You fill it with litter and get rid of the litter box, and basically lock yourself in the bathroom with the cats for four hours and keep putting them on it until they both ... go. Or, at least, that's what we did. Then, over the next weeks, you start by cutting a small hole in the middle of the new "litter box," and you make it bigger and bigger until the cats are balancing completely on the seat. Then, bit by bit, you remove the litter from whatever's left of the tray until the cats seem ok using the toilet without the litter smell.

Apparently, their instinct is to cover up the scent of their waste (makes sense). Once they grasp that the water gets rid of the scent, they can potentially let go of the litter.

And so can you.

In case any of you are into this, you have to start by first getting your cats accustomed to flushable cat litter (we use Feline Pine) and move their litter box to near the toilet in the bathroom. So, if you were just about to order your kit, start that part today.

Ahem. So, that's what's supposed to happen. We're not there yet. In fact, we went too fast too soon and ended up with poop in the bathtub and urine in the sink. There, I said it. Also, the corner of the rug has been tainted. I'm not proud of it. I'm not happy about it. But I'm willing to admit it for the sake of internet education.

So, here's how it's gone for us so far.



1. We put the seat on the toilet and got rid of the litter box.
That's Margot the kitten on the seat, and Pistol chattily investigating from edge. Forgive the blurry iPhone shot.

The cats were very interested ... because we used catnip. We've never given our cats catnip before because I think it's weird, but the CitiKitty directions recommended it and we figured we were playing with fire, so we gave it to them.

It's a little worrying, really. We are concerned that the cats may start associating catnip with pooping, or worse, that they'll wake up months from now and go "Hey, remember when we were stoned for like three weeks and we pooped in the toilet? Weird." Maybe that will happen. Who's to say?

In any case, after a good amount of cuddling, cajoling and encouragement, they both adopted the tray in the toilet. No accidents. We celebrated the fact that our cats are geniuses.
But don't get me wrong. It's messy.

First of all, you obviously have to remove the tray from the toilet and put it on the floor every time you need to use the toilet yourself. Furthermore, you should keep some bleach spray handy, because the cats like to kick the litter all over the toilet seat (not to mention all over the floor). Lastly, and worstly, they are accustomed to a bigger box and their aim isn't great, meaning that sometimes there is actual cat poop on the toilet seat. I know. Gross. Horrifying.

Bleach spray.

But, you can't help but be proud of the little cuties for figuring out that you want them to "go" in the toilet. Aw. Such good kitties.


2. Cut a hole in the middle of the litter tray.

CitiKitty makes this part pretty easy. There are perforated marks in their training tray that show where you should cut. We did as it said. The cats? Were fascinated. Margot became immediately obsessed with finding out how far down the hole she could get her paw (ew).
Unfortunately, this turned the toilet seat into something of a game for her. We thought it would be fine, but when we got home from work? Poop on the rug.

Yeah.

I proceeded to lock myself in the bathroom with the kitties for like four hours again (ok it was two hours, but still), and eventually got Pistol to do #1's on the tray with the hole.
It was so weird. By chance, she "went" directly into the hole, and it sounded just like HUMAN PEEING. I wouldn't make that up. I'm still sort of unsure how to feel about that moment.

Anyway, when Pistol was done, Margot scratched around on the tray and seemed to understand. I let them out, and spent the rest of the evening very smugly satisfied with myself. Then, in the morning? Poop on the rug.

I needed to go to work, so after scrubbing the rug, I hesitantly locked both cats in the bathroom. I felt very guilty about it, but they had their food and water, it's a perfectly nice bathroom, and they like to play in the tub anyway. It had to be done, for the sake of the rug.

Unfortunately, when I got home from work, there was urine in the sink and poop in the tub. Poor kitties. They tried so hard to be good. They were just confused.
So, we had to go back a step. CitiKitty provides a form of "insurance" for this; you can insert a backup tray over the tray to basically return to the previous step.

We let them get used to the tray being in the toilet again for a few days, and there were no more accidents. Just today, we cut a -- much smaller -- hole in the middle of the tray, and so far so good. Maybe the hole was just too big to start with.

So, either they'll get used to the hole, we'll make it bigger, they'll adapt, they'll get used to using the toilet and pigs will fly, or we have totally broken our cats.

We'll see. Stay tuned for the next installment of Toilet Training My Cats.