McT~ Best laugh in ages! Thanks so much! ~Bunnycat (away on vacation with our 2 dogs and 5 cats. And 2 of our 3 children plus another child for company. What a freak show the 4 1/2 hour ride here was...my own private traveling circus)

Hey, don't knock cats. Yes they can be PITA's, but they can also be great fun. Story in a minute, but I want to third the lava rocks. I had two small trees inside that one or two of my cats decided to use as liter boxes because they were two good to go with the others in theirs. (I have 4 cats). So we put lava rocks in the pots, and both the plants, the cats, and their humans are much happier. As for cats...true story...my uncle, who lived out in the country, hated cats. He had a stray that wouldn't go away and threatened to shoot it the next time he saw it. After coming home from church late one night with my aunt, he saw the cat sitting under the carport. He honked his horn and it wouldn't move. So he got out and looked at what the cat was staring at. It was a 3 ft long rattler. If my uncle had of gotten out of the car where he parked it normally, he would've gotten bit. Needless to say, the cat got to stay after that.

A fake bird of prey sitting on your patio would scare the others away. There is a commercial product called Deter that is supposed to fend off cats etc., but I haven't ever tried it. I have cats and they are only out when I am around, so they stay close, and locked in at night. It is really easy to do and I don't know why people aren't more responsible. I have used skewers in the ground around small plants until they were established, or around areas the cats used to like to lie in; these days the cats don't really bother the garden, but when they were young they could do some damage and the skewers worked really well. I got the tip from a friend who did the same for dogs. If you painted them to make them noticable you wouldn't have to worry about stepping on them. I am pretty clumsy myself, and never had any accidents, but I always removed them when they weren't needed anymore.

I have had cats all of my life and now I have none. I don't want anymore because they might outlive me and I am enjoying the freedom of not having them to take care of. I never kept a box for my cats until we came to live in the burbs. My cats mostly wandered in and out at will. Even in the burbs I used to let my cats out and they used the box mainly in the winter time. You know that old adage about how if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is not true? Apply that to Febreeze. That stuff is scary! Really? It eliminates odors? Scary, scary, scary. I would never buy it, ever, in any form. One of my cats was doing really poorly with lots of hair loss, losing weight, and just all around bad health. I had been feeding him the Costco brand of wet food. Once I quit that, he turned around quite quickly. I think that stuff was bad, bad, bad. One thing about that litter, though, It seems that if this would be happening to enough cats that it would be a known issue. It seems that a vet might warn people about this. There is so much cat litter sold and so very many cats that it has to have happened before. It can't be an isolated experience. Did your vet directly attribute this blockage to the litter? It certainly seems like it plausible. That stuff is very hard to dissolve with water. I think that type of dirt is used to line livestock ponds with. What a lot of money people spend on kitty litter and kitty food! What an industry it is!