Automatic Litterbox Central

I tried to toilet train my cats and failed which I'll explain in a little bit. But there are a whole slew of FREE resources online that tell you how to do it without buying the flimsy $10 kit at Petco/Petsmart and are much better methods:

Using plain ol' mixing bowl:
http://www.karawynn.net/mishacat/toilet.html

http://www.mingusmingusmingus.com/ownwo ... talog.html

http://petplace.netscape.com/articles/a ... artID=4001

Don't waste your money buying videos, books, etc.. on how to do it. The concept is pretty simple:
You'll need: flushable litter, sturdy baking pan, old books or newspapers, a lotta patience.

1. If not already using flushable litter, gradually change to flushable litter.
2. Move the current litter box as close to the toilet gradually.
3. Start increasing the height of litter box gradually using old books/news.
4. Once at the same level, move litter box on top of toilet.
Once they've mastered that remove the stack of books/news.
5. At this point, I remove the toilet lid cover and leave the seat. Then I put two aluminum roasting pans in the toilet and put the litter in that with the lid on top.
--No problems at this point--
6. Start decreasing the amount of litter gradually until you get down to just a little left.
7. Then you make a small whole in the middle.
8. Widen the hole gradually and supposedly voila the miracle happens. If they start to dump outside of the toilet, revert back to the previous step. They probably weren't ready for the next step.

Notice the word "gradually" is used a lot - that's because it may takes weeks to move from one step to the next. During the whole process, always make sure the stack/toilet/lid/roasting pan is sturdy and secure. If they have an accident and fall, they'll stay far away and do their business somewhere else.

---Why I failed---
I had no problems up until point 5. Then the blasted kitty would start going on the floor around the toilet. After a month, I got tired of cleaning up accidents on the floor so I gave up and bought an Omega Paw litter box and that has been working great ever since.

The toilet training is a great concept, but it was getting quite messy - especially if you have messy cats like mine who get poop stains everywhere and all over the rim of the toilet too. It's not worth cleaning up the toilet rim. My cats tended to smear their crap on the rim.

I enjoyed reading your message regarding toilet training. Great info. I bought a litterbox years ago that was supposed to "potty" train your cat but some where along the line, I failed because it never came about. I now have 3 cats and it seems to me that I would get little else done trying to get all 3 of them potty trained. What is the point of training 1 and having 2 others that use the litter box?

I tried the toileting thing once and hid the cat box in a low cupboard...the cats just learned to open the cupboard door and in the end that's where the cat box remained...out of sight. Never did get to the toilet but I just learned to close the cupboard doors whenever they were open, haha