Today, our dog discovered the cat box and I caught him eating the cat poop. I lightly smacked him on the nose and he spit out a mouthful of kitty roca. I scolded him them put him in his crate.
He is OBSESSED with the cat box.
Is there anything we can possibly give to the cats to make the cat poop taste bad to the dog? I don’t know how it could possibly taste good. Where is the barfy smiley when you need it? I know there is the forbid or deter if they eat their own poop, but what about cat poop? I am worried that it will affect his health as we use clumping clay litter. I don’t want to have to take the dog to get roto-rootered if he gets all plugged up from litter.
I am looking for baby gates to put on the doorways to the laundry room and the upstairs bathroom where the two cat boxes are located, but I really don’t want to permanently have baby gates up in my house. Were considering putting in a cat doors to those rooms, but with hollow core doors, I don’t know if that’s possible.
Is your dog bigger than the cats? How about attaching a small chain to the door and the door frame? Your cats can push the doors open far enough for them to get in, but not the dog. That’s assuming your cats know to open doors, but I’ve never met a cat who couldn’t figure out a door.
There is no better treat to a dog than “kitty crunchies”. Sorry, but your dog will spend the rest of its life trying to get another hit. The only hting effective is removal of the temptation.
In one house, we put in a 6" adjustable hook and eye on the door to the closet containing the cat box. It kept the closet door open just wide enough for cats, but not for the dogs. In this house, we have very limmited closets, so it is a baby gate at the entrance to the utility room.
Remember, anything that is going to change the taste of cat poop is a chemical that your cat probably doesn’t need going though its system.
I solved this problem by putting the opening to the covered litter box close to the wall. Kitties could get in, but not doggy. Voila, no more forbidden chocolate covered Cheetos for the dog!
Upon review, I see that you DO mention “Forbid.” According to the ad, it does work on cats (in other words, you can feed it to the cat to deter the dog). Good luck!
I think this solved the issue for now. We just turned the boxes around so only the cats can get to the opening of the covered box, now he seems to have little interest in getting to the cat poop.
This is possible, FWIW. We installed one because we didn’t want to keep the door open for the cats to access their box. Glad you found an easier answer, though.
Someone once told me that there’s some kind of enzyme or chemical in cat poop that’s actually supposed to be beneficial for dogs or something, or just something they crave. True or false?
All the humor aside, I had this exact problem with our corgi going after the cat crap. At least you were able to catch your dog doing it. Ours would get up and do it in the middle of the night, which caused the problem that if we punished her for it, too much time would have elapsed and she’d never make the connection she was being punished for the poop fishing. What was worse was that the dog would not just eat the poops but smear them into the carpet and move them around the house playing with them first, which made the clean-up a nightmare.
We tried the covered cat box and even put the box on a dresser so the cat had to climb to get to it where the dog couldn’t. This resulted in the cat flinging litter everywhere and the protesting the move by pissing on the carpet, which was even harder to clean up.
The solution that worked was a shock collar for the dog. We bought this one:
(Search around for the best price though because I paid a little more than $100 for the collar and the transmitter combined)
Within two days we never had another incident. We put the transmitter on top of the cat box and turned the adjustable range on the transmitter down to about six feet since we didn’t want it up so high that the dog would be afraid of that whole part of the house. You can literally adjust it down to about two feet if you need to. What we liked about it was that it gives the dog an audible warning when she starts getting close to it (very light clicking noise), then administers a smaller series of shocks as she gets closer, and then a bigger shock if she gets even closer, so there is plenty of time for the dog to turn around and change their mind. In my experience, the dog will test it a few times, but VERY quickly get the message that the cat box is an unpleasant place to be.
The only downside to this device is that the batteries wear down very quickly (after about a week of continuous use), so buy one or two extras. After about two weeks, we removed the battery and just left the collar on because the metal prongs serve are a reminder they are still wearing the collar. Then about two weeks after that, we removed the collar all together and have never had another incident. I thought it was totally worth the money. I left the transmitter on top of the litter box as a visual reminder to the dog just in case she gets any bright ideas, but we’ve never had her do it again. If it wasn’t for that, I’d give you mine…
