Do you think teaching the cat to use the toilet is impossible? What is only a movie thing? Well, I have good news for you: it is very possible and you just need to train him to get him to use the bathroom. It's not easy, it's not fast and you won't get it in two days, but by following our guide you can make your cat the most hygienic in your neighborhood.
Before we start, let's make something clear. It's much easier to get a trained cat to do it than a "lazy" one. Read on to find out how to train your cat to use the toilet, step by step.
Put the litter box in the bathroom: The first thing you should do is have the cat's litter box near the toilet. We have to get him used to going into the bathroom, so nothing better than taking his little box there. The normal thing is that in this step there are no problems. The cat will go to the bathroom to relieve itself without any problem and will not need more than a couple of days of adaptation
Raise the height of the box: There is a height problem between the sandbox, which is at ground level, and the toilet. How do we fix it? Gradually educating our cat so that it goes up. One day we put a book, another day one of those telephone directories that nobody uses and so on until the cat gets used to jumping practically at the height of the toilet.
Make sure the box is well placed on top of whatever you put underneath it, be it magazines, pieces of wood or any other material. A bad or unstable placement can mean that the cat jumps, the box falls and our little one says "here I will never jump again". That would make the cat much more hesitant to climb into the box.
Bring the box closer to the toilet: We have our box in the bathroom and at a height similar to that of the toilet, now it's time to bring it closer. Every day a little more, it is not worth going from having it in a corner to being directly next to it. Remember that it is a gradual process, so every day we push it a little bit more and more. In the end, when we get to collide with the toilet, what we will do is put it on top. Again make sure that there is not going to be any problem of instability, we do not want to cause trauma to our kitten with the toilet.
Reduce the litter level: The cat is already doing his business on top of the toilet, but in the box. Now we have to get him unused to the sand and the box, so we will remove more and more sand. Little by little we reduce the amount, until there is only a small layer that is barely a couple of centimeters high.
Replace the box with a basin or similar: Now we have to change the cat's mentality. You should go from relieving him in the box to doing it directly in the toilet. There are different options to do it, from training boxes that are sold in the pet stores themselves to a simple basin that we have at home. You can create your box with a basin that you place in the toilet and a resistant paper that can support the weight of the cat under the lid. In addition, you can put some sand so that the cat continues to feel a slight memory of its litter box and relates it.
Make a hole in the paper and remove the basin: When he has been accustomed to relieving himself in the basin and the paper for a few days, we must remove it and make a hole in it so that they begin to fall into the water. This phase can be complicated, but we must take it easy until the cat manages to do it comfortably. Once we see that it is comfortable, we enlarge the hole until there is practically nothing left. At the same time that we enlarge the size of the hole, we have to remove the sand that we are placing on top of the paper. Your cat has to get used to doing its business without sand, so we will gradually reduce it. In this phase we will have already gotten him to relieve himself in the WC, but there is still one more to go to strengthen this attitude
Flush and reward your cat: Cats don't like to defecate or urinate in their own urine. Also, it is not hygienic to leave your necessities in the toilet because the smell is quite strong. Therefore, we will have to flush the chain every time the cat uses the toilet, both for our hygiene and for that "mania" of cats. To reinforce the attitude, we will give the cat a rewardevery time he urinates or defecates in the toilet. This will make the cat think that he has done something good and that next time he will do it again to receive the reward from him. And if you've made it this far… congratulations! You've managed to get your cat to learn to use the toilet! Did you find it difficult? Do you have another method to do it? If you have managed to get your cat to do it, tell us how you did it. And if you haven't, we can help you get to this seventh step.
