Potty Training Your Cat - Did you Follow the Proper Procedures?

If you’re a first-time cat owner, or you’ve had problems with potty training your cat in the past, it may seem like a difficult task lies ahead. However, potty training your cat is actually quite simple if you follow the proper procedure. In fact, your cat’s mother most likely started the potty training before your cat was even weaned. This is why it is so easy for you to finish it. Even without a good mother cat’s training, potty training your cat for litter box usage only takes a short amount of time and patience. So, enough talk; lets get set up for the training.

The Preparation Procedure

Before you can begin potty training your cat, you need to own a cat litter box and cat litter. A well-constructed, plastic litter box will do. If you have a small kitten, start with a cat box that is low enough on at least one side as to make the cat litter inside readily apparent to the kitten. If you cannot find a box small enough, use a thick phone book as a step for your kitten to see into the cat box and get into it easily while you are in the process of potty training.

The litter you choose is not really important, but you should know that you have a couple of choices. Litter basically comes in either clumping cat litter or non-clumping cat litter. Both work fine. The main difference is that clumping litter is easier to handle if you want to just siphon out the clumps to clean your cat litter box. As far as potty training your cat, it doesn’t matter which type you use. If you get the clumping kind, get a sifting scooper to pull the clumps out without the rest of the cat litter. You can generally find the sifting scoops near the litter boxes in pet and grocery stores. Don’t forget that before potty training your cat, you must fill your cat litter box about 1/3 full of cat litter.

The Basics of Potty Training Your Cat

To begin potty training, just put your cat in the litter box five minutes after each meal. Typically, your cat will be able to use the cat litter after each meal. If your cat quickly jumps out of the box, try again; this time scratching the cat litter surface slightly as you place the cat. Cats have a natural instinct to try to drown out the smell after they potty, so they will get the idea that this is a good place to potty and then cover up their potty. They may have also learned some of this behavior already when they were with their mothers. For most cats, you will find that at this point you are done potty training.