We keep the toilet lid closed so the cats dont play and drink. I have had a cat fall in, and boy was he pissed.
We had a cat that would push himself under the lid to get a drink. We though he was too lazy to come downstairs for his water bowl.
I’ve had dozens of cats, kittens, dogs, & puppies over the years and have never had one of them fall into the toilet, ever. Plenty have enjoyed a nice cold drink, or played with the water for fun, but no one has ever died because the toilet lid was left open. Maybe my pets are just extremely smart, or perhaps I am just lucky, but decades of pet ownership & thus far, zero deaths by drowning in the open toilet.
Many years ago, I had an emergency appendectomy. There were complications, and I was hospitalized for two weeks. This was a reclusive period in my life, so there was no one who knew where I was. When I was finally able to get home, my cat had become a wild creature, and messed up my entire apartment. But he was kept alive by drinking out of the toilet. Since then, I always make a point of leaving the lid up, just in case.
We have five cats, and keep the lids down. I’m not worried they’ll drown, but we used to have one who enjoyed flushing the toilet. I’m convinced at least a couple of our current cats would be smart enough to make the connection between “push down the little handle” and “watch the swirly-water show,” so I’d prefer not to give them the chance to prove me right!
Lid down here. I don’t believe there’s any real danger of the cats drowning in an open toilet. But if you use any kind of blue water cleaner like Tydy-Bowl, (if that’s still a thing) I don’t think it would be heathy for the cats to get into it, and then lick themselves clean.
I [del]have[/del]am caretaker for 2 cats now and have [del]had[/del]been the caretaker for several dozen in my lifetime and I have never done anything with the toilet lid on their behalf. In what may seem a miraculous achievement to the OP’s roommate, no felines have died or been been mildly traumatized thusly.
Only when I have a tiny kitten around, or a very tottery elderly cat.
Given the shape of a cat vs the shape of a toilet, I’m not worried.
I keep the lid down because * it’s a lid*; the default position is down because it is closing the container where waste goes. And also because kittehs is so nosy.
13 years after OP…cats still drink out of toilets, lol. The radical change in this advanced sci fi future is I can post from the toilet. I mean, I could in 2005 also but my laptop then was hot and heavy…
Can’t see it happening. But then again, I enforce a “lid down” policy in my home. Whenever my old-enough-to-know-better daughter leaves the lid up I tell her “My sugar gliders are going to die!”
Cats will do fine, but apparently sugar gliders like to shower curtains and dive-bomb the toilet, and they are too tiny to scamper out.
Fortunately, I don’t actually have any sugar gliders.
I’ve never had a cat that had any interest in the toilet. I’ve had cats who insisted on being in the room while I used the toilet, but they never had any interest in the toilet itself.
I keep the lids down because that’s what the lid is for. Who wants to look at a toilet bowl?
My cats never expressed any interest at all in the toilets.
I suppose what it boils down to is that if you leave the lid down most of the time, do it all the time. It’s been far too long since we’ve been able to be owned by cats - but my first one, in college, got used to gallumphing into the bathroom and jumping onto the normally-closed lid.
Then one day someone left the lid up. Sadly, I was not a witness to this: the cat ran to the bathroom, tried to jump onto the lid, which wasn’t there… and got a brief, unwanted bath before successfully violating the laws of physics and LEVITATING out of the toilet.
Not 24 hours after posting one of my kittens almost fell in the toilet. Now, I think he would have been okay. He’s a big kitten and he’s been around. I have had cats that fell into the bathtub and they miraculously walked on water and got out of the bathtub and did not get wet. I should note that he arrived just as I was getting up, before I had a chance to close the lid. He’s fast. And he was also agile enough to avoid falling in, which was good because then he would have needed a bath. Or I guess I could have just flushed it.
He went from there to the sink. Cite: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Our cat had gotten used to drinking from the toilet and we put in one of those bleaching things not thinking about it and it made the cat sick and it almost died.
I’m reminded of the joke about how to catch a polar bear.
Ahhh…thank you for solving a decades old mystery! I’ve always wondered my my ex-BIL’s parrot drowned in the toilet. It probably wanted to bathe and between the wet feathers and the slipperiness of the sides it couldn’t get out! Thank you!
As I mentioned once in this thread, several years ago, we always keep the lid down on our toilet, mostly for the benefit of the cats.
One time my wife Pepper Mill lifted the lid, preparatory to using the toilet, and our cat Lotta then chose to jump from the floor up onto the toilet en route to the window sill. Only, of course, the toilet lid wasn’t there, so poor Lotta went into the toilet bowl instead.
The only thing worse than a wet cat is an unexpectedly wet cat. She scrambled out*, splatted onto the floor, and glared at Pepper as if this had been intentional. Then she stalked out of the bathroom, trying to maintain her dignity.
*Fortunately, the toilet had not been used, so Lotta was spared the extra indignity.
No, cats won’t fall in a drown, but sometimes if they tend to either play or drink for it. However a cat that has no history of either I leave it open as a emergency water supply incase her water bowl gets spilled over and we are away. Hey, It’s better then dieing of thirst.