It was around this time last year that I thought I had finally found a "green" kitty litter that met all the criteria needed. It was biodegradable, the tracking was not bad, it actually contained odor (most "green" litters do not contain odor, I don't care what their bags or web sites say), and the cats approved....Well, I thought the cats approved.
About 2 months after converting to "World's Best Cat Litter", one of the cats began pooping directly in front of the box. Every day. Not anywhere else in the house, only right in front of the box. Right in front of the entrance to the box. Not like "oh, I couldn't find the box". This was intentional. Whoever it was peed in the box with no problems, and presumably pooped at least one other time a day inside the box, but always first thing in the morning, right in front of the box.
After 3 months of this we took Gabby to the vet to see if she was sick, we thought for sure it was her (she is always "the bad one" because she can be vengeful). The vet basically said, maybe they don't like the litter, but he had never heard of this happening and there is nothing wrong with her physically. We paid $70 for there to be nothing wrong with her, which I already knew because she was acting completely normally. I thought, surely not the litter, because she had been using this litter 2 months or more before this problem even came up.
This continued for another 4 months. Sometimes getting better, but most of the time it was consistent - every day, one poop outside the box. When I became pregnant, I couldn't clean the litter box anymore (something about cat feces is dangerous to unborn fetuses, apparently). Every day I had to call Christian over to pick up the poop, because now I also have this super sense of smell. I can smell the uncovered poop from anywhere in the house. Sometimes Christian was gone and I had to put on gloves and a face mask to remove it myself (he does not want me doing this so I tried not to...but sometimes the smell was so bad!).
One day, a breakthrough - Christian caught Samantha doing it! She was the culprit all along, not Gabby! After that, I caught her a few times too, and we tried disciplining her when she did it. She absolutely did not care and kept it up. She even did it at my parents' house when they stayed there during our trip to DC. We didn't take her to the vet because she had recently had her annual physical and there was nothing wrong with her. At this point she'd been doing this for almost a year. If there was something physically wrong with her, she would have shown other signs by this time.
Finally we switched one of the two litter boxes back to the old Arm & Hammer "kill the earth" will-never-biodegrade cat litter. They both completely quit using the "green" litter and resorted to using only the one box with Arm & Hammer. This was not fun because the box needed to be cleaned twice as often. So we had to switch both boxes to the Arm & Hammer.
Now we are back to killing the earth, but the pooping in front of the box has pretty much stopped (there was one relapse during the time when there was one box of each litter).
The moral of this story is that the "green" way, as much as we want it to work, just will not always work. I have now tried every brand of "green" litter in the stores here and none of them both control odor and are acceptable to my cats. "World's Best Cat Litter" was the best performing, and I stand by that, but the cats would not accept it.
Since I don't exactly want to be picking up loose poop for the rest of our lives, I am just going to have to accept the conventional clumping litter. Which is too bad, because the conventional litter is so much heavier and the tracking is so much worse than the "green" litter was.
You can leave comments suggesting other brands if you want, but to be honest, I am really not going to try to acclimate the cats to another kind of litter and endure the horrible odor and the pooping everywhere in these last few months of my pregnancy, especially since I can't clean it up myself.
Sorry, earth :-(
Since I've lately gone to all the trouble to actually purchase "real" URL's for my two blogs, and have also started to attend more BlogHer/DFW Blogger meetups, it appears the time has come for me to actually order blog business cards.
