Cat Litter

House cats have a few essential needs, water, food, love, and a place to poo! Some cats are picky about where they will do their business, but not Meow. He's been willing to soil any type of litter we put down for him to use, which makes life for his human servants (me and my wife) a little easier!

So, the key is...what do the humans prefer to use? Well, I have a few things that I look for when selecting cat litter, and here is the list I threw together off the top in no particular order.

• Is it absorbent, or will my cat track his dirty little feet all over the place because his "business" is not absorbed somehow.
• Does it have a pleasant scent, and how long does it remain pleasant? I don't necessarily expect it to smell like a flower-bed for a week, but the litter should have a neutral scent that generally absorbs or masks the poopy smell a bit.
• Is it scoopable and/or flushable? When possible, I like to get in there right away and scoop out those offending packages and flush them away. I do not like clogging my sewage lines, so it is important that it will not do so.
• Will my cat track it all over the house because the litter is too fine or light weight to stay in the litterbox?
• Is it environmentally friendly? To me, that's a plus.
• Will Meow use it? So far, he's used everything. What a guy!
• Is it reasonably priced? I'll not pay $50 for a pound of litter - no matter how good it is!

So, generally those are some of the things we look for.

Yesterday's News is what we currently use (hey, that rhymed!) Generally, it is pretty good in all of our points above except it doesn't absorb as quickly as we would like, and it isn't flushable. Sometimes, when Meow has a big, looooooooooong pee, he'll go and cover it like a good cat, except it's still a puddle at that point and hasn't absorbed. So, we end up washing his feet right there so they don't stink like pee! Its strange because the bag claims "3X more moisture absorbing than clay" - I think that it is, just not right away, and that's my main problem with this product and the reason we're looking to try something else.

Yesterday's News is also "low tracking" because it has pellets instead of little sand-like particles, so it doesn't stick to his little feeties when he's done. As I mentioned, this stuff can't be flushed so you just have to sift the pellets from the poops when you clean the box, and you should be OK. When wet, the newsprint pellets kind of puff up and slowly mutate into a messy, grey, semi-stinky pulp type stuff, and it does not clump. We change the box twice per week with this product, but we scoop the solids as they are left for us. Such suckers!

We have also tried something called Feline Pine which seems like a nice, natural product, but it really didn't work for us. Its made of pine, which for the most part is a nice-smelling substance that should absorb orders. It does, but we found that it was quickly overwhelmed by Meow's massive and odoriferous droppings. In addition, as soon as it got wet, it turned into this highly-trackable sawdust type stuff that got all over the place. More of a mess than we hoped, and you actually need a special scoop with this product. I don't think we even finished the bag because it turned into such a mess. Hey, we tried.

So, that's where we're at for the moment. I'm going to poke around and see what the "masses" say about litter, and try something else that absorbs a little more quickly than the otherwise excellent Yesterday's News and post about it here.