Mmm, Cat Poop!

Today I thought I'd make a plug for another product that I absolutely love: the Clevercat top-entry litter box.


With so many dogs and cats, I think about poop a lot. I examine it to judge the status of the contributor's health and I think about ways to dispose of it. And poop is also a perennially favorite dinnertime discussion topic among my dog friends, but then that's dog people for you.

But cat poop takes the discussion to a whole 'nother level. Dogs love cat poop. I don't know any dog worth being called a dog that doesn't try to eat cat poop whenever she can.

People like me with multiple dogs and cats have different ways of dealing with this. By my conscious decision, my cats are not allowed outside. All of the places I've lived in the past 20 years have been populated with a variety of predators that like to eat cats. I love my cats, and would prefer that they not be eaten. But cats are in their turn predators. I don't like the idea of introducing into my local ecosystems predators that I artificially support (with cat food, vet care, shelter, etc.). I put out feeders and water and landscape with native plants to attract birds and other wildlife. It seems a cruel injustice to turn cats loose on that buffet.

My cats have all been rescues, adopted when they were very young, and none seem to miss that devil-may-care, free-wheeling outdoor life, if they ever even experienced such a thing. They have rich lives inside with lots of different places to play and hide and sharpen their claws and things to torture and kill, if only metaphorically. I grow wheat grass for them. They have plenty of sunny windows.

But this brings us back to cat poop. Because cats kept indoors need litter boxes.

After watching my new puppies Harry and Iz gobble up sodden, clayey lumps of cat litter way back in 1999, I said, there has to be a better way. And indeed there is: the top-entry litter box.

Clevercat designed a brilliant product. It's basically a plastic storage bin with a hole cut out of the lid. Because we, the human, can get to the entire box by lifting the lid up and off, cleaning it is a snap.

The brilliance of the design is this: the hole is too small for large dogs to get their head inside and the litter level is too far below the hole for smaller dogs to get to it. The exception would be really tiny dogs who could jump inside the litter box just like a cat. But as long as your dog is even a bit larger than the average house cat, this is the product for you!


I purchased this pair of Clevercat litter boxes almost 10 years ago. Five different cats have used them. And not one of my fox terriers has been able to get in there and indulge.