Out of the poop loop
January 15, 2011
It’s a dirty job, and it doesn’t get done often enough. That’s right, folks, I’m talking about the price of living with your furred or feathered sweeties. And scaled, I suppose. I guess fish and snakes poop, too.
Everybody has their least favorite household chore. Mine is laundry. I hate doing laundry. It’s not even the washing and the drying. It’s the sorting and folding and putting away. Socks and underwear have gone whole seasons without getting back to their drawer, as I pluck them clean from the laundry basket on top of the dryer. There is a two-foot stack of clean, folded shirts on a chair which, for some reason, I simply can’t bear to take fifteen feet back to my dressers to put away. What the heck?
So scooping the litterboxes should be simple by comparison. Sure, ideally, it would happen more frequently than laundry—as in daily, when it would be a smaller, faster task—but for some reason I tend to put it off until it seems monumental, and then I put it off some more. And so on.
I give props to all four of my cats (the two current and the two previous) for being very forgiving and reliable, even when the boxes are a mess. My rabbit, Robbin, well, he gets himself to the litterbox corner but …
I know that out in the rest of the house, Robbin doesn’t like current cats CJ and Dasie very much, and I think this extends to sharing the litterbox with them. He didn’t seem to have any beef with my previous cats, Dhia and Yul. In fact, his reliable litterbox use (along with not being a chewer) is what earned him the free-range lifestyle. But then the cat individuals changed, and so did his toilet habits. But maybe it’s also a function of his increasing age (he’ll be eight next month). I know he’s still physically able to get into the box; he still frequently jumps up onto my couch and various chairs. All I’m left with is that he doesn’t like CJ and Dasie’s, um, smell.
Anyway, what I do know is that he is more likely to get into the litterbox if it is fresh, clean litter or if it’s not, if the box freshly scooped. So why the heck don’t I just scoop already?
Bibi (no longer with us), CJ, and Robbin, takin’ care of business.