Can You Potty Train Your Kitty?
You’ve probably seen Meet the Fokkers, and there, at the very least, you came across the idea of potty trained cats. The question is, can real-life kitties be trained to use the toilet? It turns out that the answer is “yes, but…”
Professional Tools
It sometimes seems like no matter what we want to accomplish, some clever person has come up with a way to do it. So it is with potty training cats. Clever people have come up with pre-made systems and tools that you can use to teach your cat to use the toilet. One example is Litter Kwitter. How does this work? Here’s what an article from NBC has to say:
Litter Kwitter and other toilet-training kits on the market for cats work like this: The toilet seat is fitted with a series of plastic rings the cat can step on so it doesn’t fall in. The hole in the rings gets larger over time, until the cat can simply balance on the toilet seat.
Discover ↓ Step By Step How ↓ To Do It!
Patience Is Key
As you probably already know, being patient is an important part of the whole process. Cats don’t exactly love being trained :-/ The NBC article goes on to say:
You also need patience. “Cats learn at a very metered pace,” Duno said. If you go too fast, your cat might find other places — furniture, plants, rugs or closets — to go…
80% Succeed
The folks who make the Litter Kiwtter kit claim an eighty percent success rate. They say it would be even higher if more of us were willing to listen:
Lapidge [one of Litter Kiwtter’s inventors] says the kit has an 80 percent success rate that “would be higher if humans stopped to follow all the instructions and showed a bit more patience.”
But It Isn’t Always Easy
Despite the high rate of success, the process of potty training your kitty can take a while and be a challenge. In “So long, litter box: These cats are potty-trained!” NBC says:
Online customer reviews for the products are mixed. Even those who say they’ve been successful often say it took several months to complete the training, with the cat having accidents along the way. One commenter for a toilet-training kit for a product called CitiKitty gave it five stars but cautioned that the process was “messy.”
More Than One Bathroom
Unlike you or me, kitty may not understand that sometimes you have to wait your turn:
Herron cautioned that a cat is likely to find another place to go rather than wait in line at a bathroom door, so a spare or guest bathroom the animal can use works best.
Really? No Treats?
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We know, you love to give your kitty treats. We do too! But the experts say that treats are not the best way to reward your cat for properly using the potty:
Finally, no matter how happy you might be to have toilet-trained your cat, Duno said this is one animal behavior that shouldn’t be rewarded with a treat.
The Long and Short
The take home message seems to be that we can train our cats to use the toilet, but that it takes time & patience, that treats are not the best reward, and that we need more than one bathroom to make it work. In the end, using a professional system like Litter Kwitter (which you can buy at Amazon) that includes video instructions is probably the best option. Do we recommend it? well, we’ll let you know when we give it a shot =D
You can read the original post we excerpted here by clicking this link: So long, litter box: These cats are potty-trained!
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