By popular demand...

Recently, I decided to attempt to toilet train my cats (think Mr. Jinx in 'Meet the Parents'). I've had several people ask me to start a blog to share my experiences, so welcome to Gwen's Zoo!

Toilet training my kittens Franklin and Linus appeals to me on several levels. For starters, the environmental impact of cat litter is kind of staggering. I currently use pine chip litter, which I guess is sort of reclaimed, but it still has to be bagged up and thrown away every other day. Secondly, cat litter is just disgusting. Aside from the smell, I'm appalled by the amount of litter that gets tracked everywhere in my house. Thirdly, the hygienic prospects of flushing away the waste a couple times a day as opposed to scooping it out with a flimsy plastic shovel seem pretty great.

I did some research about cat toilet training on the WWW and decided to give it a go. This is partly due to the aforementioned problems I have with cat litter and partly because it's winter and I'm bored out of my mind. I needed a project. I'm usually pretty fascinated by the prospect of understanding what animals did in the wild, prior to domestication, but I've never had cats before and I'm curious about their trainability.

I think my boys will be good candidates for toilet training because they are absolutely fascinated by the bathroom and the toilet. You can almost always find them in the bathroom exploring something. They are also pretty adaptable little fellows. They're not the kind of cats who get really fussy if you move their litter box or switch brands of litter. And starting this while they're still young can't hurt either.

So my first task was to begin moving the litter box slowly into the bathroom. I was so glad that I'd chosen to initially put it in my guest room, which is right across the hall from the bathroom. If I'd put it downstairs, it would have taken a year to get it upstairs! I started small--the first day the box went from directly inside the door of the guest room to directly outside the door--a move of just a few inches. Every day I would move the box a little closer to the bathroom. After each move, I would show the kittens the new location of the litter box and give them a treat. (If this sounds like how one might train a dog, one would be correct. This is all I know, people. I'm new to cat ownership.) Once I finally got the litter box next to the toilet, I started elevating it a couple inches a day until it was level with the toilet so the cats would get used to jumping up to use it. After that, I let them use the box for a couple of days while it sat directly on the toilet, weighted down with a book so they wouldn't spill it when jumping out.

Today was a big day! After nearly two weeks of preparation, I got rid of the litter box altogether. Instead, I got an aluminum roasting pan and molded it around the rim of the toilet and filled that with litter. With any luck, Franklin and Linus will learn to get onto the seat of the toilet to potty.