An Update on Miss Braeya's "Adventure"

Several of you asked to hear updates on Miss Braeya Jo's toilet training adventures so you could go and do likewise, and while I am the last person on this earth who ever imagined blogging about the potty, here I am! {And if you're new and confused, Braeya's a cat. A ten year old cat. And my husband has decided she can learn to use the potty like the people of the house.}

So when I last officially reported in, she was in phase two of this process. Let me catch you up real fast.

PHASE ONE, per the kit we purchased, involved putting the litter box in the bathroom so she would be used to coming to that room to have her potty party. Well, we were already ahead of the game, because that's where ours has been since we learned the closet was a bad idea. So we moved right ahead to...

PHASE TWO! This phase was to take the existing litter box and place it on top of the toilet so she would get used to using the potty in that exact location. So we removed it from the little aesthetically pleasing box where it had been, blocked that box off entirely with a trash can to prevent accidents/rebellion, and put the box on top of the toilet, thus taking us down to a one bathroom house for human purposes.

A couple of notes on this phase for any of you planning to try this:

* We put a folding chair beside the toilet so she could jump up on the chair and into the box. That seemed to be a good move because I'm not sure she would have leapt up into the box from the floor of her own accord. Depending on the layout of your bathroom, the edge of the tub or something else could make this step unnecessary.

*  This is MESSY. When she jumped out of the box when she was done, she sort of cascaded litter everywhere. So there was a lot of cleaning involved every day. {Ryan did it all, just to give credit where credit is definitely due.}

* Keep an eye on that box. Sometimes her leaping enthusiasm shifted the box a bit, and one day I found it sort of precariously leaning toward one side of the toilet seat. NOT eager to have an entire used box of litter dumped on the bathroom floor, I fixed it in a hurry, but that's something to watch for.

Having been successful for a week with phase two, Ryan moved on to...

PHASE THREE!

This phase began to use the actual kit we purchased. It's called the CitiKitty, and it was featured on Shark Tank. It comes with a couple of toilet bowl shaped pans that are an inch and a half deep (I measured) and fit down over the actual toilet bowl.

You can see from this picture that they have sort of a target with a bullseye design, and the intent is that you start with the whole pan and slowly punch out the middle rings until the pan is fully open like a toilet. This part takes a while, and we are not remotely through it yet.

We had to buy flushable litter, and please make a note that the brand we got (from Arm and Hammer) SAYS it's not to be flushed, but the guy at the pet store and Google both assured us that if you are on a city sewer system, it's okay. But if you're on a septic system, DO NOT USE THIS. I think Ryan found another brand on Amazon that was flushing friendly across the board, but just keep that in mind as you make your selection.

The kit said to fill the pan with the litter, sprinkle some catnip on top, and see what happens. (Loose translation.) Well, Braeya can get drunk on catnip pretty quick and rolling in it is her favorite pastime, so when we introduced it, she curled up and got busy enjoying. THE TOILET. Okay, so not the outcome we hoped for.

We sensed pretty quickly that she was just confused by the whole thing, so we made our own Phase Three A, which was to mix the new, flushable litter with her old, familiar litter. (At this point there were NO rings punched out on the pan, so nothing was actually getting flushed.) Literally the minute we did that, she got it and hopped in to do her thing. Maybe if she were young and being trained on this from the start, that wouldn't have been necessary, but it was what we had to do to get her to understand.

A couple of notes: 

* Because the pan is so shallow, again - MESSY. Litter sort of flies everywhere. And sometimes I'd catch HER in the litter, but her little hiney was hanging over onto the edge of the pan (which is the equivalent of the toilet seat, so I knew we had some work ahead of us).

* This definitely has to be cleaned out frequently for two reasons. One: smell. Since it's natural litter, there's nothing to mask the odor, and it's right out there in the room, so there's no structure to cover it, either. Two: Appearance. Because the amount of litter in the pan is minimal, she quickly ran out of places to stand while she went, and no one likes looking at this. That's just the truth. We were in the middle of Ryan's gallcation during this phase, so I did the cleaning, and I cleaned it out twice a day.

PHASE FOUR: We started this phase just this week, and I did take a picture, but I am not even lying: it is such a foul look that I absolutely cannot post it on the world wide web. The shape of the hole is not entirely family friendly. LOL! But in phase four, you cut out the middle hole of the "target." It's very small, so there's not a lot of change from the previous phase. The goal is to get her used to positioning herself so her rear end is over the hole.

A couple of notes:

* You definitely want to make sure you have the flushable litter ONLY at this point, as it will end up in the toilet, even if just from the cat moving around on top of the pan.

* At least in our experience, she's not necessarily hitting the hole as much as she's still using the litter. But it's a start. And we did have another accident where it went on the floor. We think this has only happened twice since the very beginning, so it's already probably a better ratio than kids and puppies!

* You'll want to leave each phase active for approximately one week before moving on. We waited to start this one until after we dog-sat for Phoebe. We figured that would freak her out and there was no need to add to the stress by changing phases in the middle of that. She seems to be fairly well adjusted with each phase after a week, so it's working fo rus.

* At this point, you may be really tired of having a bathroom out of commission. I definitely miss having an active second bathroom! But we're hanging onto the hope that it will be worth it!

So there you go! Updates from the world of toilet training cats! Or at the very least, THIS cat.