Train Your Bengal To Use The Toilet!
Yes, you heard that right, train your Bengal cat to use the toilet just like you! This comes with drawbacks which you will find, however if you consider the pros versus cons, many would say that it is the way to go!
The obvious pros that jump to mind are not having to deal with litter and with that, the entire litter box smell situation all together. Other advantages really just stack up on the fact of not needing litter, things like saving money, not having to go and buy it, litter is heavy after-all. With all the obvious pointed out, what many may not know that the largest benefit of having a toilet trained Bengal is the freedom it awards you. No more days needed spent hunched over digging around for excrement's, like a feces archaeologist. I mean common isn’t this 2020, shouldn’t pets be using the toilet like us?
Okay, that sounds amazing, why isn’t this a thing? Well there are two large factors that contribute to keeping cats in the litter box. Firstly, it's not easy and can take some time. In order to convince your Bengal to “Drop it like its hot” in the toilet, it’s going to take some commitment. Plan on a few weeks up to a couple months of a routine commitment. Another thing to prepare for is that it will be messy. There will be good days and bad days, just prepare to deal with litter everywhere and the occasional miss, that will make it down to the floor. Trust me, it's worth it, just stick it out! More considerations into the fact you will need to leave the toilet seat lid up and of course flush the toilet when you can get around to it. We would recommend NOT training your Bengal to flush the toilet. Let me just put it this way, your Bengal can learn to flush the toilet yes…. But they do not understand why to do it and they can just decide to flush the toilet several times because they like what it does. So just think twice about that step haha! The last con we would say which really isn’t a con in the true sense because there is a benefit to it, but you will need to keep a rag and sanitizer handy so you can wipe the seat before use if your Bengals have been stepping on it.
We tried a few different tactics that didn’t seem to work, and then we stumbled on CitiKitty, actually watching Shark Tank. We thought, hey that might just work so we ordered one. To sum it up, it totally worked, we had Bengal cats using the toilet in about 3 weeks. Where we hit a wall was when we had litters. When one of our queens would have a litter of Bengals, we would have to put down a litter box for the babies, and well of course the adults would resort right back to the litter box. So we had to resort back. So it can be done and when we had that stretch of not having litter boxes, life was glorious as a cat owner. So we definitely recommend it to someone who will just have pet cats and are not breeding.
CitiKitty has a simple concept that revolves around first placing a litter tray on your toilet seat and gradually reducing rings from the center that breakaway until the ring is the same size as the toilet seat opening. At the beginning your Bengal will just think, ok my litter box is up high now and they will use it like that. Once you break the first ring, they will still use it and may occasionally hit the hole, but by the time you're on the 3rd or 4th ring they start to get the idea.
Be advised, you will need to use flush-able litter if you plan on attempting this. Please DO NOT use regular litter as it is not intended to go through your plumbing system. So please be sure to get some flush-able litter, here are a few of our favorites.
Bolux Flushable Cat Litter, Worlds Best, & sWheat would be our recommendations. We have used Bolux and World's Best personally and they work fine, sWheat was recommended to us by another breeder we have known for a long time and they gave us good feedback on it.
So if you hate litter, and the smell of a litter box then we highly recommend trying out the CitiKitty.