Sprockett and Tuki
Believe me, I never had the intention of having this many cats at one time, but it happened. 2 feral kittens needed a home. And sooooo....I took them and named them Freddie and Flossie. From the Bobbsey Twins when I was a kid. I mean after all, when you have five cats, what's two more???
Well STINK!!! That is what two more does! I added another litter box but even WITH the Arm and Hammer Slide litter that has GREAT odor control, it gets stinky very quickly. It also gets very expensive very quickly. A large box is about $23.00 and I am going through one and a half boxes a week. I really have a problem paying for clumpy dirt for someone to shit in. (I shouldn't have used that word. Sorry.) But I do! Bad enough I have to clean those boxes twice daily, but to pay that much money is nothing short of irritating.
So looking over my options....I can't get rid of any cats! I love them too much. I can't go to a cheaper litter. I actually like to LIVE in my house. As it is with the Slide litter, there are nights I sleep in the living room because the stink of someone laying a new bomb in the litter box is enough to make me gag. It is getting to the point where I need to wear a gas mask to sleep in my own bedroom! Add to that the fact that the stupid litter clumps and gets into the cat paws between their little pads and they track it EVERYWHERE. I have tried every mat out there and nope. I still got kitty litter on the floor, in the sink, in the bathtub, (cat boxes are in my master bathroom), on the carpet in the bedroom, on the book shelves, in my bed. Wait. What? Yep. I have a couple of cats that love to hide beneath my covers and when they can finagle it even WITH me tucking in the sheets so tight you can bounce a penny off of them, those little buggers still manage to get between the sheets.
Enough is enough when you have to wash your cats paws to get the clumping litter from between their little pads. Sooooooo......
I finally had an epiphany. My barn does not smell and I only scoop there ONCE a day. Why is that? So I finally went out and got a bag of wood burning pellets that I use for bedding in the stalls. (I use the wood burning pellets because they are about $5.00 a forty pound bag whereas the Equine Pelleted Bedding is $12.00 a bag and it is exactly the same thing. Probably safer because the wood burning pellets have to be rated for humans.
I replaced all the cat litter with pellets. They are not so small they get stuck between their little pads and they don't track them all over. A few on the floor now and again, but it isn't as bad as stepping on Legos. The pellets dissolve into saw dust once they get wet and that stuff sifts to the bottom of the litter box. I still have to scoop poop out of there, but I only have to do that once a day now. At first I was sifting all the pellets and dumping all the sawdust, but I finally came to the conclusion that it is easier to just leave it and dump it all and put new pellets in every 2 to 3 days. Just depends on how much those cats drink I guess, but it is working! No more horrid smells wafting through the house. And no more clumping cat litter between my sheets.
I thought I was such a genius. Until a video came up on my YouTube feed. DOH. I guess people have been doing this for some time now. They are actually layering pans, drilling holes in the top one and sifting the sawdust out. Which is a lot easier than taking out the intact pellets with a pooper scooper like I was doing. Whatever.
I just like the woody smell. Much preferable to wearing your prepper gas mask to bed each night.
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