I left my cat alone in the house for a few days with my housekeeper popping in to feed and entertain him. He had a little over 2 day spell on his own at the end when my housekeeper couldn't come in. When I arrived home I discovered that our housekeeper had accidentally closed off the door accessing his litter box. I searched the house looking for the mess but couldn't find anything.. until I went to the bathroom and found that he had taken upon himself to use the toilet. He's definitely gone up in my esteem since.
All to say that some cats don't need any kind of training to use the toilet.
This is true. My cat definitely pees in the sinks and bathtubs sometimes even when his litter is fresh. He poops in the litter with no issues, so I don't think it's a location problem. My best educated guess is that he simply finds the sinks more convenient than hiking down to the basement.
I have no doubts that he would pee in the toilet as well, but I can't leave the toilets open because we have dogs around.
(Although, now that I'm typing this, I suppose we could install cat-doors on the bathroom doors to let the cat in, and keep the dogs out...)
The sink/bathtub peeing is definitely gross and not ideal. But, not as gross as it sounds. He very very precisely pees directly down the drain. The smell is almost unnoticeable. So unnoticeable that it took us a lot of time to figure out he was even doing it, since he sometimes pees in the box as well. The main danger to him peeing in the sinks is that it will make it difficult for us to know if he has a blockage as we can not monitor his urine output.
(I am not "noseblind" to cat pee smell, as far as I can tell. The litterbox is in the basement and if I neglect to clean it on a given day and there is pee in there, I can smell it from upstairs. I've also asked trusted people like my brother to verify there's no cat pee smell in the house! He's not afraid to give me harsh opinions...)
It's a non-scientific term for a commonly-accepted phenomenon. Like a lot of other stimuli, the brain gets pretty used to filtering out constant background smells.
A lot of pet owners don't seem to realize the pet smells in their house because they're so used to them.
You see this a lot. People who live near smelly garbage dumps, in smelly cities, near farms that use a lot of manure, etc. They get used to it and stop noticing it.
I think we all experience some level of this. Everybody's home has a distinctive (usually benign) smell. But you usually don't think about it or notice it. Until you step into somebody else's home.
Hmm yes, I've noticed that with my old house. Oddly, the only time I could smell it was when I put my shirt over my nose for a while (so I could smell the inside of my shirt) and then took it off.
Hopefully my current flat doesn't smell like cat pee.
Hopefully my current flat doesn't smell like cat pee.
The only real solution may be brutally honest friends and family with decent senses of smell :-)
But I mean, if you're emptying and changing the litter regularly I'm sure it's fine! At least that's what I tell myself if my brother hasn't been around lately...
If this is really a big problem I wonder if a brand could come up with a mix of Bitrex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium) and one of those deodorizers/fresheners you put hanging on the edge of the toilet bowl.
Yeah. It's not exactly the end of the world if a dog drinks from the toilet bowl, but we're the type of dog owners who have a lot of physical contact with the dogs, so we'd definitely prefer them not to be dripping with toilet water.
Especially if the cat doesn't learn to flush like Charles Mingus' cat.
All to say that some cats don't need any kind of training to use the toilet.