Automatic Litter boxes

Are automatic litter boxes worth it,

Or are they just an expensive way to be lazy?

Jamie Flanders CDBC FPPE CFDM CBC

The era of convenience has found a way allow people to avoid one of the primary responsibilities of cat ownership. I can understand the appeal of an automatic litter box but there are two major issues for me.

  1. Size

  2. Health checks

A properly sized litter box should be 1 and 1/2 the length of your cat from nose to base of tail, and wide enough to turn comfortably. Automatic litter boxes do not meet these requirements. Inadequate litter box size is a top reason why cats may stop using the litter box. You may also find urine or feces next to the litter box because it’s too small and though the cat is inside it, their bottoms hang over or near the edge.

Cramped space in this litter box makes using it unpleasant for the cat.

Cramped conditions in this automatic litter box make using the litter box unpleasant for the cat. This can drive cats away from using the litter box at all.

When a box isn’t big enough your cat may urinate or defecate outside the box simply because their isn’t enough space to fit their entire body and account for the trajectory of the output.

Keeping track of your cats urine and fecal output and the quality of their bowel movements is an important and simple way to monitor your cat’s health and can help you catch health issues early. When you allow an automatic litter box to scoop away your cats outputs for you, you don’t get to see if your cat has diarrhea, soft stool, hard stool, blood in stool, strings or foreign material in their stool, parasites in their stool, color of stool, not enough stool per day, too much urine output for a day, or not enough urine output for a day.

Some things you’ll never know about your cat when using an automatic litter box.







Jamie Flanders