Seeing as a large segment of my modest readership finds me care of “pooping outside the box” or similar cat search terms, I realize an update on the topic is in order. Let’s just say, it hasn’t been all wrapped-up pretty like a Martha Stewart episode. Fact is, the Army Corps of Engineers would have a tough time containing my recent cat urine problems, and in case you were wondering, I don’t have an Army Corps of Engineers lying around to work on this urgent matter. What I have is one guy, and I call him Hank.
Karmically, I believe Hank and I can trace our current problem back to an Abyssinian named Denial. Denial had the messy habit of pissing directly backward out of the litter box door, an act that confounded his human companion, my apartment mate, who would complain about it often. I clearly recall being really, really glad that my cat didn’t do that. Well, that kind of thinking never pays off in the long run, because now I have a cat who does the very same thing.
It wasn’t always like this, but somewhere along the line a litter box got moved facing the wrong direction. Herman changed his orientation inside and wham-o, now we can’t for the life of us keep that cat’s piss inside the box. Who knew our dry, contained reality was so fragile?
That single change of direction soon set in motion a cascading avalanche of new litter box technologies at our house, each tried one after another and soon dismissed. Finally, Hank was forced to invent his own “solution,” and this current set-up is by no means ideal. What Hank has brought into the world is nothing short of a litter-box mansion, a box within a box, which if you ask me (and Hank did not) is a rather extreme response. Yes, the litter mansion has solved the issue of escaping piss, but it’s caused its own problems, not least of which being that it’s ugly, it’s huge, it stinks, AND it’s in my living room.
Outside on my patio lie the wreckage of boxes that didn’t work. The closest one to working, The Buddha Dome Deluxe, is a lovely lavendar dome with stairs spiraling up to the box proper. How, you may wonder, did Herman Panther manage to twist his piss out of this arrangement?
I don’t know how, I only know that at some point Herman became a horizontal urinator. And the force of his stream can seep right through seams, around corners, down stairwells. It’s remarkable really. It’s made mince-meat of the best litter-box architects of our time, and I have the pile of defeated attempts to prove it.
So for now, the new litter mansion keeps the problem at bay, so to speak, and creates more problems, like all the time it takes Hank to clean the various litter-mansion rooms. I did manage to find a nice grass mat to hide the hideous thing with, and that’s about as resolved as we can get on that topic. Sorry, Martha, the truth ain’t too pretty sometimes.
Oh dear! I’m glad the litter box mansion is working. I have a very elaborate layer or trash bags taped around where my cats litter box is. It takes careful monitoring and looks quite silly but for now it’s the best I could do.
LOL, found your site searching for answers to my cat’s nocturnal crazies. You are a phenomenal writer.