Furball’s days of using eco-friendly cat litter may be numbered. Recently, Ewa, one of my blog readers, wrote in to recommend toilet training your cat as an alternative to using kitty litter. It made a lot of sense to me when I calculated that Furball was going through at least 200 lbs of litter a year. I also knew he was toxoplasmosis-free, so I wasn’t concerned about flushing his waste.

Ewa wrote that she was using the Litter Kwitter cat toilet training system and thought this was the best system as it seemed more durable and allowed you to go back a step in the training process. Without it being said, she was probably comparing Litter Kwitter to CitiKitty.

After I read her email, I looked at reviews on Amazon for Litter Kwitter and CitiKitty. There seemed to be a number of reviews that concurred with Ewa.   I thought about buying the Litter Kwitter, but balked at the hefty price tag. Also, when I read feedback on toilet training your cat, it seemed like the bathroom would be one giant mess of litter, feces and urine until the cat was trained, which could take months. With the demands of a new baby in the house, I hesitated.

After I posted Ewa’s tips on toilet training your cat, I got an email from CitiKitty. They offered to send me one of their cat toilet training kits for evaluation. They also told me some interesting facts about their product. It’s green!

They use recycled plastic and 100% recycled (50% post-consumer-waste) paper for the instructional materials that come with the kit. The product and its packaging is made in the U.S. unlike Litter Kwitter, which Amazon reviewers said was made in China. Litter Kwitter also comes with an instructional DVD, which seems a little unnecessary.

As with anything “green”, you need to weigh the pros and cons of the resources used to make the cat toilet training kit vs. the resources and waste from cat litter.

One of the major complaints about CitiKitty in the Amazon reviews was that once you punched out a ring, you couldn’t go back if your cat got freaked out by the bigger hole. Well, I just received the CitiKitty cat toilet training kit today, and I noticed there’s an extra ring set included that does allow you to backtrack.

My mother-in-law is going to be visiting for six weeks to see her grandchild and give us a helping hand. I figure this would be the only and best time to attempt to toilet train my cat, Furball.  Grandma will able to look after the baby in case I need to do a major bathroom clean every day. As well, the baby isn’t crawling yet, so he won’t be exposed to any stray cat litter.

I’ll keep you all posted at how successful the process of toilet training my cat is. The one thing I gathered from the reviews is that you need to go slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly.