Litter-training kittens … the key to success?

I think everyone who’s read my posts of previous years on litter training will have realised that coaxing kittens to use their litter trays has not been my strong point.

(consider this is the equivalent of a whisper because I don’t want to tempt fate, but …)

I think that I may have finally got the hang of it with this litter of kittens.

The difference this year is that I confined them to a kitten enclosure from the time they had to start litter-training for about two weeks, only letting them out under supervision, or until they learnt to scale the pen).

The enclosure was quite large, about 4 feet square, with space for a bed, a cat scratching post and two litter trays. 

The litter trays were small to medium-sized and filled with a double-layered sandwich of Yesterday’s News pellet litter and kitchen towels.  I find that the YN pellets don’t absorb pee quickly enough and sometimes kittens’ paws get sopping wet.  So the kitchen towels provide a surface to stand on that is a little drier.

Another trick I used was to wipe the litter trays with a bit of kitten pee so that they still retained the smell of urine.

Imagine my great pleasure when I found a kitten squatting in a tray, having its first pee. [BTW, kittens always scream when they first start peeing and pooing - it is quite alarming].  Imagine my even greater pleasure when most of the kittens started using the tray.

Sure, we’ve had accidents, but compared to previous years, they’ve been fewer.

But, to be honest, I think I got lucky with this litter of kittens.  They’re little bundles of cleverness, they’ve actually litter-trained themselves.

The move downstairs – New kitten quarters

I moved the kittens downstairs about two weeks’ back, when they turned 4 weeks’ old, into the living room.  This was prompted by Mum Cat bringing them chicks to eat.  I figured that she knew when they were ready for solids.  But if I was gonig to start weaning them I had to make sure they had access to litter trays for that all-too important phase of their lives – litter training.  The bedroom, with its carpets, wasn’t the best place for litter trays.  So downstairs they had to go.

In previous years I used a kitten pen which the kittens always managed to get out of.  It was a large pen, but after I added a litter tray (small), box, water and toys, it got quite cramped and they outgrew it quickly.  So this year I built a makeshift enclosure out of whiteboards from B&Q.  Here it is:

As you can see, plenty of room for their kitten box, litter trays, water bowl and a corner for some vet bed and a cat-scratching post.  I placed it next to the cat tree so that Mum Cat could get in and out by jumping onto the top of the kitten box and onto the cat tree.  The sides of the enclosure are so far still too high for the kittens to scale.  The floor of the enclosure is made of 3 whiteboards taped together – such a dream to clean!

What my cats think of Cats Best Nature’s Gold cat litter

(please note that the opinions in this post expressed by my cats or myself are in no way representative of the general usability of the cat litters mentioned.  Cat litter usage depends on personal preference – some cats prefer one type over another, and of course, you need to buy the one that suits your needs and lifestyle.  And judging by the variety of cat litter on the market, there’s one that will suit every cat and cat owner’s preferences!)

As mentioned in my post about the Supreme, I bought some Cats Best Nature’s Gold.  It’s a variant on their OKO plus which is granular, made from spruce and fir, but in pelleted form, so there’s less tracking, and it’s supposed to not stick to longhaired fur.  So far so good – it’s lived up to those two promises.

Up until then I’d been trialling Sainsbury’s Ultra Clumping which is clay-based.  Yes, I know what I’ve said about not using clay-based clumping because of how it sticks to innards.  I’d only bought some because my supply of World’s Best (corn-based) litter had run out and the supplier had messed up on the delivery of kitten packs to my new kitten owners [they've promised to rectify this - hope so].  Surprise surprise, the cats took to the clay-based clumping readily – it had a granular sandy texture which they loved.  My Maine Coon girl, in particular, is a digger and she loved flinging it around the tray and burying her stuff in it.  It also absorbed smells well.  It tended to track, but that was also the case with World’s Best.

Anyway, I switched the litter to Nature’s Gold on Saturday, and got worried because even though it was used for pee, there was no poo until today (Monday).  I’m grateful they used it though because changing litter wholesale isn’t easy on cats – you’re supposed to do it in stages, a bit at a time.

In terms of cleaning, Nature’s Gold is easy to clean.  The clay-clumping litter tended to stick to the bottom of the tray, so you had to chisel it off sometimes, and it made me uneasy not to be able to totally remove all the dirty residue.  Nature’s Gold’s clumps lift off easily and cleanly with no sticking to the bottom of the pan.

In terms of clumping, Nature’s Gold clumps well with fluids (i.e. urine), and you can’t smell the urine.  But when it comes to cat poo, it didn’t quite cut it – it tended to form a thin coating to the poo, but my cats couldn’t quite bury it deep enough.  So it didn’t quite contain the poo smell.  So today I changed one of the pans back to the clay-clumping version to see which the cats would prefer.

Nature’s Gold reminds me of Yesterday’s News (which is pelleted recycled newspaper), but it’s softer and lighter.  I might use it again if there’s another litter of kittens, in place of Yesterday’s News.

The problem with clay-clumping litter is that it isn’t very eco-friendly – you can’t dump it in the loo.  But, I’ve just found out that you shouldn’t dump cat litter in the loo, anyway, because of a parasite called toxoplasma that is possibly present in cat poo.  This toxoplasma isn’t destroyed by sewage treatment and can end up killing sea otters and other sealife.  This is something that the makers of environmentally-friendly cat litter manufacturers haven’t mentioned.  I wonder why.  Check out the article in the link below:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/11/13/petscol.DTL&hw=cat+litter&sn=001&sc=1000

Cat Litter 2 – why not clay-based clumping litter for long-haired cats

The previous post on cat litter was meant to be a one-off, but now it seems my musings may become a series.

As the title of this post so succintly implies, clay-based clumping may not be the best choice for long-haired cats.  Or kittens, as the case happens to be.

If you recall, in Cat Litter 1, I was comparing World’s Best (a corn-based clumping) with Catsan clumping (clay-based).  Despite the fact that WB is more expensive, the kittens went for the Catsan.

I was on the verge of transferring my loyalties to Catsan.  [sigh of relief from bank manager]

Anyway, last night I changed my mind.  I got back to find the waft of cat poo in the house.  I couldn’t track down the smell until the little boy kitten started digging up a rug.  He only does that if the rug is dirty so I knew something was up.

I picked him up and ohno-ohyes, the smell of kitten bottom hit me.  Turns out that his poo must have been slightly squishy and stuck to his bottom and he’d tried to get it off by sitting in the cat litter.  Unfortunately it was the Catsan, and it was stuck to his bum and his furry pantaloons.

I tried cleaning it off with wet kitchen towels, but it only just set the mix so that it was like a plaster cast.

In the end, I had to plonk him into the kitchen sink and run the tap.  He struggled and lashed out and the resulting stigmata he inflicted on me has me running for a sainthood.  He did hold still for about 5 seconds when he felt his bum ease.  It was a nasty task, needing much fingernail work – best not read this if you’re eating.  Finally I gave up and dried him off and he scampered away without a thank-you.  Then I had to clean the kitchen floor which had suspicious paw stains on it, and the living room floor.

So … this is the last time I use a clay-based clumping litter for the kittens.  Seeing how hard it clumped and stuck to his fur, I can understand why the kitten was unable to clean his bum.  And thank heavens for that, because if the kitten had swallowed the litter, imagine what would happen to its insides.

Cat Litter 1

Well, it’s happened again, Murphy’s Law of Multiples.  You bulk-buy something the cats like and then they decide something else suits them better.

 In this case, it’s cat litter.

I’d run out of the staple, World’s Best Cat Litter and placed an order with my usually- reliable supplier on a Thursday only to be informed the the litter wouldn’t be delivered until the following Monday.

 I was tempted to wait until then, but I usually wash, bleach and totally change at least one of the trays weekly and hadn’t been able to do it for the past week.  What made it imperative to have a dump and total replacement of the litter was the Bengal – she walked into one of the trays and straight out again, holding her breath.

So it was off to the supermarket for a temporary stop gap and I bought 3 bags of Catsan clumping.

I don’t usually use clay-based litter having read loads of warnings about how it clings to cat’s fur and when they lick themselves, it clumps in their intestines and clogs up their insides.  So I decided to use it only in the adult trays.

Of course, what happens next is that the kittens stumble on the adult trays in their explorations of the house, and suddenly I hear this scrape-scrape and when I next clean the litter tray, it’s obvious from the size of the deposits that the kittens have used the tray filled with Catsan.

The following week, voila, 4 bags of World’s Best arrive but on Thursday, not Monday.  In the meanwhile even though they have 6 six litter trays in the living room to choose from, the kittens have chosen to hold their bladders and bowels until given access to the Catsan-filled tray.  (ooh, don’t you love the way cats love to keep you in a state of uncertainty?)

So, do I continue with WBCL?  Or should I switch to Catsan clumping?  With the latter I could afford to change ALL the trays every week, and still have change left over for a set meal at the local Japanese. 

 So far the odour control of Catsan has been passable, but then, the kittens are fed raw, so the poo doesn’t have that fermented commercial food pong that lingers.  Catsan is heavier than WBCL though, because it’s clay-based, not corn-based. 

It’s serious business, this thing about cat litter, amongst breeders.  We are conscious of the fact that we have to have whiter-than-white standards of hygiene when breeding, and all dream of the perfect cat litter that is 100% harmless and 100% cheap.

A study was done on the effectiveness of cat litter in providing a medium of growth for coronavirus (see my post on FIP) and apparently the cat litters that were most hostile to the coronavirus were Everclean (clay-based), a brand from Costco (clay-based) and Tesco (yep, clay-based).  And the problem with clay-based (or fuller’s earth litters) is that they’re quite heavy too and if you’re into saving the earth, you can’t just flush it down the loo like you can with World’s Best.  [Addendum 14/08/07:  aha - I've found the study - it's on Dr Addie's web-site.  I did google the site last night, but it wasn't up-and-running.  Here is the link for the Cat Litter League table - you need to scroll down the page a bit.  Also please note:  Tesco's Value litter scored high on the scale, but I've heard that it allegedly doesn't control odour that well, and sticks to the tray etc.].

It’s a toss-up between what won’t hurt the cat’s insides and is easy to clean, and economical to use (especially in the lavish quantities that breeders have to use).

In the meantime, buy shares in World’s Best.

Kittens – Litter training 11 – litter trays

If you’ve read my previous post written last year, with its photo of litter trays, you’ll have guessed that I have loads of litter trays.

I collect litter trays.  I think that’s because I’m hoping that somewhere there’s the perfect litter tray that kittens will take to immediately, i.e. litter trays = wishful thinking.

Here is a photo with a cross-section representation of my current collection.

The latest addition is a corner litter tray (the one in the middle of the photo).  I saw this on the web-site of a breeder who had the kittens in a pen, and the tray in a corner.  Just one tray – imagine it!  And everything looked spotless in her kitten pen, so it was obvious that it was the tray that was responsible for these perfectly-litter-trained kittens.  So of course I had to have one too.

I like the idea of a litter tray that will cope with those awkward corners.  This corner litter tray is large enough for a medium-sized Maine Coon to plonk her rear end inside without any spillage.  I haven’t used it yet because the entrance is a little high for a kitten in a hurry.

It’s a covered tray which I find extremely useful because Ananda digs for Britain in her litter tray and tends to flick litter all over the place.  A covered litter tray also tends to bring out the tap dancer in Ananda – you know she’s using the litter tray by the shuffle-shuffle as she digs, and then a kind of tap-tap morse code as she scrapes the sides of the tray.

The litter tray of the week is the one on the back row, extreme right.  It’s grey in colour and is a good size, with high sides and a little cut-out in front that is low enough for kittens to crawl in.  It’s large enough for a medium-sized Maine Coon mother cat who persists in using the kitten litter trays to demonstrate how to use them.

I am using Yesterday’s News cat litter in most of them.  It’s cheap enough so that I can dump the contents once or twice a day and not hear my wallet screaming in pain.  I also put in a sheet or two of kitchen towel because I found that with Yesterday’s News, the pellets didn’t always absorb the urine fast enough, and when the kittens scrabbled around, they got wet paws, and when they jumped out of the litter tray, they took their wet paws with them.  The kitchen towels help to provide a layer of protection.

The covered tray on the extreme left is filled with World’s Best Cat Litter.  It’s a corn-based litter, and so harmless if the kittens try to eat it.  I don’t use those clear plastic flap doors that come with covered trays – they’re supposed to trap smells, but I don’t think cats appreciate being trapped in  tray with smells.

I got the corner covered litter tray from Zooplus, an on-line retailer of pet supplies.  The rest I purchased from Purrsonal Touch at various cat shows.

Mr. Sticky Bum

Good news: Roly (the male tabby kitten) has finally got the hang of using the litter tray for the Big Ones.

Bad news: Roly’s poo is still sticking to his bum and to get it off he drags his bum on the floor. This morning was a frenzy of cleaning as the floor was smeared. I had a look at his offering in the litter tray, and it was quite well-formed, so I’m not sure why it’s sticking to his bum.

Bad news: Roly’s not cleaning his bum properly, and mum hasn’t bothered either. So I had to do it. Yum – just what I needed before breakfast.

So I’m off to find some pureed pumpkin which is supposed to be very good at firming up the poo. I think maybe the raw food I’m giving the kittens needs some fibre in it.  In the meantime, Roly has a new nickname: Mr. Sticky Bum.

Kittens – Litter Training 9 – a few new tricks

(a continuation of the Litter Training saga with the new 2007 Litter!) 

Up until last week the kittens still weren’t getting the hang of what the litter trays were for. 

I had trays scattered about the living room, but I must admit I think my mother cat isn’t very good at training them on how to use them.  She’d use the trays in front of them, but the kittens still persisted in leaving puddles.  Plus, mum cat and Teddy were overzealous in doing botty duty and the kittens were still having their bums suctioned clean at the age of 5 weeks.

It’s my fault.  From advice given by other breeders, what I should have done is pen them with a litter tray until they learnt to use it, because at the end of the day, cats are clean creatures and don’t like being dirty. 

Instead I let them run round the living room.

Despite my errors, I have some good news to report – the kittens are getting the hang of the trays, thanks to a few tricks.

(1)  Don’t clean the litter trays too often – this leaves the scent of urine in them and attracts the kittens to them.

(2)  The first few times kittens pee, they crouch and cry out with a loud mew, almost as though they’re in pain.  When you hear that cry, pick them up and put them in the nearest litter tray.  It may not pee then, but there will be that occasion when you get lucky and the kitten will give you a look of gratitude.  Of course this means that you will have to watch the kittens like a hawk to catch it at that moment.

(3) When the kitten is in the litter tray, encourage it to pee by wiping its bottom with wet cotton wool to simulate a mum’s cat tongue, or even massaging its tummy.

(4) Put the kitten in the litter tray after or shortly after a meal.

(5) Kittens like finding corners in the room to pee in.  Put litter trays there.

(6) There are kitten and puppy training aids like Swiftie (by Bearphar) that you sprinkle onto the litter tray that attracts kittens.

(8) Place the litter tray onto a MDF/fibreboard.  This makes cleaning easier.  If the board is white, you can spot the puddles quicker.  I bought some of these MDF boards and they’re under the living room table and under litter trays.  I also have these boards on the carpet in the hallway where the previous litter of kittens had peed – I suspect there is a residual smell there, and I want to prevent this litter of kittens from emulating them.

(9) And finally, last, but not least.  Pen the kittens up when you first start litter training.  You will need a large-enough pen to contain their bed, litter tray and space for food and water.  You will also need to be thick-skinned to ignore the squeaks of the kittens as they press their noses to the front of the pen and plea to be let out.

You know you’re a cat breeder when …

… you talk about kittens leaving wet patches on the bed, and your esteemed colleague at work flinches and goes “urggh” and looks at you like you’re some sort of barbarian living in sordid conditions [possibly true] with poor hygiene standards [not where the cats are concerned].

But when you mention it on a breeder’s forum, there are understanding nods all round and copious replies offering solutions and sympathy.

Kittens – Litter training (not) 8

(a continuation of the Litter Training saga with the new 2007 Litter!)  

I’d taken Monday and Tuesday off work to be with the kittens after I’d moved them downstairs.

I have to admit, that because there are only two kittens I’ve been able to spend more time with them.  Consequently, Poly the little girl would lie trustingly on the sofa beside me and fall asleep.  And Roly would run to me when I called him by his name.

Anyway, I had these high hopes of litter training them in two days.

Hollow laugh.

Firstly, even though they had started on solids, their bowels weren’t moving as fast as I thought they would.  I found a few stains on some towelling I used as their bedding, but that’s it.

Today I got home from work, and they’d done it on bedding.  I soaked up as much as I could with paper towels and placed the paper towels in litter trays which I had scattered all over the living room.

Then I heard the little boy kitten crying, and I didn’t move fast enough.  He peed in a corner of the living room.  So I mopped that up too and put it in the litter trays.

I’m not sure where this is getting me.  Maybe I’m a cautionary tale to all you people out there with kittens to litter-train.  Maybe I’m a source of jokes and humour amongst you people whose kittens take to their litter trays without any problem.

I’m sure they’ll be litter-trained sooner or later.  I wish it were sooner though.