Triumph des Katzens

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But we with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t” but we would be some
Who wouldn't say so till we’d tried.

My cat doesn’t use a litterbox anymore. My cat uses the toilet.

Credit goes to Adrienne for even thinking of this as an option; while I was still vaguely looking through “free cat to good home” ads on Craigslist, she had found this website and suggested we use the process it describes to try to toilet train our yet unknown kitty.

The most common response to our proud claims that our cat would soon use the toilet was “I thought that only happened in movies.” This was often followed closely with “…like, Meet the Parents. Will the cat be able to flush?”

No, the cat doesn’t flush. We probably could have taught him, but if you combine the warnings people give about cats not knowing when enough is enough, flushing-wise, with our cat’s strange fascination with moving water, you can see how this might not be the wisest idea.

Anyway, it was a somewhat longer process than we’d anticipated: about three months of explaining to visitors why the litterbox was balanced on top of the toilet, or why a metal bowl of litter (and later, water) was in the toilet bowl. There were …incidents… and there were minor triumphs and disasters, and sometimes it was pretty gross. Sometimes I had to stay home on a Friday night and watch to make sure the cat didn’t try to scout out a new bathroom location, and occasionally overnight guests would back awkwardly out of the bathroom in the morning, toothbrush dangling precariously from their mouth, to report that the cat had just jumped up onto the toilet and begun to use it and they weren’t entirely sure that it was polite to stick around for the duration.

For the record, Icky doesn’t seem to care at all whether someone’s watching him, which looks promising in terms of getting photographic evidence of his new talent.

So yeah. My cat is pretty much the cleverest. And I will never have to clean a litterbox again.