An Australian mother fed up with cleaning up after her kids’ cat has taken matters into her own hands and built a device which teaches felines to use the toilet.
Jo Lapidge of Sydney said on Wednesday that after watching the movie Meet the Fockers, in which a cat uses a toilet, she decided to train her own Burmese kitten to do likewise.
Lapidge said she had promised her children, aged five and eight, that they could have a kitten but that ”after the first week of dealing with this disgusting litter tray I was really regretting it”.
But after watching the comedy she decided to transform the family moggy into Jinx, the toilet-trained cat of the movie.
Lapidge bought toilet seats and other apparatus and created about 15 prototypes.
The invention met resistance from her cat Doogal but within three months he was fully toilet-trained. Most cats shouldn’t take more than eight weeks, Lapidge said.
The ‘Litter-Kwitter’ system consists of three plastic trays which can be fitted inside a toilet bowl.
In the first stage the largest is used as a normal kitty litter tray on the ground before being placed within the toilet bowl. In the later stages this is replaced by two other trays which have increasingly larger holes cut out of the middle and less litter.
Eventually the trays can be removed altogether and the cat will learn to perch on the edge of the toilet seat.
Lapidge says she never intended to sell the device.
But after receiving more than 2 000 inquiries, her product is likely to go on sale in about eight weeks for between Aus$80 and Aus$150.
Now, if Lapidge could just teach them to flush… – Sapa-AFP