CitiKitty Cat Toilet Training Kit: Teach Your Cat to Use the Toilet, Then Watch Your Cat Poop on Your Pillow in Protest

The CitiKitty Cat Toilet Training Kit is a graduated system of plastic inserts that you place over your toilet bowl. You start with a full insert (basically a litter tray on the toilet). Over several weeks, you remove progressive rings from the center of the insert, creating a larger and larger hole, until the cat is balancing on the toilet seat and doing its business directly into the bowl. Then you remove the insert entirely. Congratulations: your cat uses the toilet. You have achieved the holy grail of cat ownership. No more litter. No more scooping. No more litter box smell.

Unless the cat refuses. Which many cats do. In which case your cat, having been trained to associate the toilet with bathroom activity, having had its litter box removed, and having been asked to perform balancing acts on porcelain at the age of six, makes a decision. The decision is: the floor. Or the bed. Or your pillow. Or the laundry basket. Or the spot directly next to the toilet, as a message.

The message, translated from cat, is: "You changed the social contract without my consent. The litter box was fine. The toilet is an abomination. I will now poop on every surface in this apartment that is not the toilet, because you took away the only surface I wanted to poop on, which was the litter box, and you replaced it with a porcelain water bowl that I was not consulted about."

Cats are not dogs. Dogs want to please you. Cats want to be left alone. The CitiKitty asks a cat — an animal that chose domestication reluctantly and on its own terms — to learn a new bathroom skill because the HUMAN wants it. The cat does not want it. The cat was content. The cat had a box. The box had litter. The system worked. The human disrupted the system. The cat will make the human regret the disruption.

The Vision: Eliminate the Litter Box (Achieve Cat Chaos)

The CitiKitty appeared on Shark Tank and received investment because the pitch is undeniably appealing: no more litter box. No more buying litter. No more scooping. No more smell. Your cat uses the toilet like a tiny, furry roommate. The dream is a cat that flushes. (They cannot flush. This is not addressed.)

The system works in theory and sometimes works in practice — some cats DO learn to use the toilet, and for those cats and owners, the CitiKitty is a genuine convenience upgrade. The internet has videos of cats perched on toilet seats, doing their business with the casual competence of a person reading a magazine.

What the internet doesn't show — or shows in very different comment sections — is the failure rate. Cats that won't use the insert. Cats that refuse the transition. Cats that complete the transition and then regress, reverting to floor-pooping months later because something changed (a houseguest, a new piece of furniture, the wrong brand of air freshener, a butterfly outside the window — cats regress for reasons that make sense only to cats).

Veterinary behaviorists generally advise AGAINST toilet training cats. The concerns:

1. Cats can't flush. Unflushed cat waste sits in the toilet bowl, creating hygiene issues. 2. Cats lose their litter-box instinct. If the training fails or regresses, re-training a cat to use a litter box after toilet training is significantly harder than the original litter box training. 3. You can't monitor health. Veterinarians use litter box habits (frequency, volume, consistency) to monitor feline health. A toilet-trained cat's waste goes straight into the water, eliminating this diagnostic tool. 4. Multi-cat households. If one cat is toilet-trained and another isn't, the toilet-trained cat may refuse to share the toilet with the non-trained cat's scent, resulting in... the floor. 5. Old age. Cats develop arthritis. An arthritic cat that has been toilet-trained cannot easily jump onto a toilet seat. The alternative: the floor. Again.

The Glorious User Experience

Rachel from Brooklyn, NY — ★☆☆☆☆

"Phase 1: Success! My cat Oliver used the insert. Phase 2: Success! Oliver used the insert with a hole. Phase 3: Success! Bigger hole. Oliver is a toilet cat! Phase 4: I removed the insert. Oliver looked at the toilet. Oliver looked at me. Oliver walked to the bedroom and pooped on my pillow. Not the bed. Not the floor. MY PILLOW. Making direct, unbroken eye contact. He pooped on my pillow WHILE LOOKING AT ME. The eye contact was the message. I received it. I bought a new litter box. One star."

Tom from Austin, TX — ★☆☆☆☆