As a cat mom or dad, you’re spared the chilly mornings and rainy or snowy nights when pupper parents are out walking their dog and hoping she’ll “do her business” so they can get back inside where it’s warm and dry. But since kitty’s toilet is inside, you do have the job of cleaning the litter box.
While you won’t have to pick up poo in a plastic bag after every deposit like a dog owner, you will have to adopt a maintenance routine of scooping out clumps of urine and feces and giving the litter box a thorough change and cleaning regularly. How you clean and maintain a litter box depends on your situation.
The type of litter you choose makes a difference in how often you’ll need to clean the cat box. Clumping litter absorbs cat urine and forms hard clumps that can be scooped from the box, leaving the unsoiled litter behind. If you use non-clumping litter, urine will be absorbed by the clay or other ingredients such as corn or wood, with some falling to the bottom of the cat box under the litter.
Clumping litters need changing less frequently because you can use a litter scoop to remove the coated clumps of cat pee and poop. Non-clumping litters cannot be scooped, so to clean them you must change out all of the litter each time.
A litter that contains odor-controlling ingredients will keep down the smell and extend how often you will need to scoop the box or change out all of the litter.
It stands to reason that the more cats you have, the more urine and feces will accumulate in the litter boxes and the more often you’ll have to clean them. While this is true for the most part, some litters are designed for multiple-cat households and have strong odor-controlling ingredients to help prolong the time between cleaning.
If you have more than one cat, you’ll want to have more than one litter box, too, so this helps distribute the urine and feces between the boxes. In this case, you won’t have to clean the individual boxes any more often, you’ll just have two or more boxes to maintain.
If you’re a clumping cat litter user (and about 60% of kitty parents are), there are two ways to clean the litter box: the scoop and the change. Scooping out clumps of urine and feces is something done regularly, every other day at minimum, but often daily or even twice daily if you have a cat in a small apartment and want to keep litter box smell under control. Cats don’t like dirty litter boxes any more than you do, and kitty may start going outside the box if you don’t keep it clean.
The other type of cleaning is when you dump all litter, scrub out the box, and start over fresh with new litter. If you have a non-clumping cat litter, this is the only way to clean the cat box: remove the old litter plus urine and feces, and add fresh litter. If you use clumping cat litter, scooping the poop and pee regularly prolongs the need for a dump-and-change, though this more thorough cleaning should still be done at least monthly.
Do you remember playing with a pail, sieve, and shovel at the beach or in the sandbox when you were a kid? Scooping out the litter box is much the same as sieving out items from the sand, but in this case the buried “treasure” is clumps of urine and feces. The real treasure, though, is a clean litter box in about the same amount of time it takes to brush your teeth (if you’re doing it properly!).
Giving the litter box a scoop is easy and takes only a few minutes. Here’s the basic process for how:
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