05 January 2009

Civilizing my Cats


Before the holidays, I started toilet training my cats after hearing someone mention it. I guess the only point of this post is to report that they are now going in a bowl of litter in the toilet. I think George usually has both back legs in the bowl and I'm not sure what Simon does, but I think I saw him with ALL four legs in the bowl and once with just the back feet in the bowl. One site says that I'm supposed to train them to keep their feet out of the bowl by physically moving their paws and praising them if they keep the paw up. I tried it once with Simon and he did not like it one bit, so I gave up. I saw another site that said to use some sort of disposable aluminum pan that you can cut a hole in the middle of and increase the diameter and apparently the cats will move their feet onto the seat on their own. I don't know. With the current trajectory, I am supposed to decrease the amount of litter and eventually add water to the bowl, before taking the bowl away entirely. Right now, I am just letting natural atrophy of the litter level by removal of the pee clumps, but I think they are used to it by now and so maybe I should move more aggressively. I don't know.... I'm not around enough and they are too sneaky for me to catch them going to the bathroom very often, for me to even attempt to move their paws onto the seat. Maybe I should decrease the litter and hope that they won't want their feet down there where they do their business. Ah well. At least I'm half way there, right?

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