Training

OK, can't believe I'm really blogging about this. But here I go.

Heather has a cat named Clipsy (short for Eclipse, which is another story: Clipsy has been her companion since about fifth grade when Heather showed up with this soft white kitten with a half black, half white nose - hence her name - and the bluest eyes I've ever seen. The animal broke all the rules - especially the big one "No Cats In The House EVER!" and quickly became a 'fixed' and de-clawed house cat, after giving birth herself to three kittens while she was yet a baby.)

Clipsy has been a very good cat about using the litter box until last fall, when something happened and she decided the cool concrete floor in the unfinished bathroom area of the basement was a more desirable place to go pee. So she adopted the floor as a pee place and reserved her litter box for a poo place. Nothing like the ammonia odor of cat pee soaking into concrete to jar the senses. Mix that with the smell of the molding floor and walls of the kitchen upstairs, and our house began to smell worse than a very unclean restaurant.

Well, Heather moved out in May and left behind her sweet pet, bad habits, unused litter box and all. Brent figures the cat is just getting old and maybe it's time to put her out of her misery, which is typical. He has never learned the pleasure of an a soft warm furry vibrator asleep on your lap. Me, I have always loved cats, and in the last nine years confess I've grown rather partial to this one.

So I've put forth a seemingly pointless effort to get the cat to use the litter box again. First step was to totally scrub the floor with Ajax and Cleaner World cleaner and cat pee neutralizer and Febreeze. I read somewhere that they won't repeatedly use a location if they can't smell the urine there. And the smell did go away. Until she used it again the next minute.

Ok, so it wasn't the "odor" thing. After the next cleaning, I put down a big layer of plastic, thinking she'd leave the plastic alone. But, no, that didn't work either. She used the plastic and then "buried" it into a big pile and used the floor she had uncovered. Brent was really ready to find a vet who would just put us out of her misery.

After those attempts, I finally got wise and put newspapers down over the plastic. That was at least a step in the right direction. Now she used the newspapers and they were too heavy for her to dig up so they kept the plastic down, too, and the floor was somewhat protected. The litter box sat in the middle of all this, unused except for her two dumps a day.

Thrilling.

I started to make the area of plastic and newspapers smaller and smaller, hemming it in with cardboard boxes until finally, this last week, the newspapers are just one paper wide and right next to the litter box.

This morning when I got up, the cat was all over me. She jumped on my lap and tried to nuzzle my chin (I HATE it when she does that, by the way). Obviously, she was trying to get my attention, so I finally set down my project and followed her downstairs to find an empty water dish. I gathered it up and went into the bathroom to fill it. There I discovered the newspapers were still dry and the litter box slightly disturbed. She had actually used the litter box for what it was intended. Hooray!!!!!

I feel like a mother who's finally got her youngest child to use the toilet!

Anybody want a wonderful, litter box trained cat who is getting old enough that you won't even have to deal with her for more than another ten years?