Make Avoidable (but Necessary) Work Unavoidable
A parable of cat pee
Back when interest rates could be counted on one hand, the spousal unit and I were house hunting. As is the right of passage in this ritual, we were treated to the stunning experience of learning what our budget would buy in various places.
One house we looked at was exactly where we wanted to be, location-wise. It would have come in at the top of our budget* and was the only property in the area in our price range. As we did the walk-through, I smelled Febreeze. This always gets my hackles up (asthmatic here: please stop scenting things that don’t need to be scented), and it often indicates that some mess could not be cleaned.
As I stood there, breathing shallowly, another smell broke through the artificially fragranced veil. There was cat pee soaked into the wood floors. The kind of deep, lingering smell that made me suspect that even if we ripped up the floorboards—even if we ripped up the subfloor, we might still be visited by the ghost of cat pee past every time it rained.
As we continued our exploration, the story revealed itself: The cement floor in the basement was also impregnated with cat pee (and worse). The people selling the house had a cat (obviously). They kept the litter box in the basement. And they never scooped it.
Out of sight, out of mind.
In my experience, cats will put up with a lot**, but even the best cat has a breaking point.
I grew up where the ground didn’t freeze, and basements were few and far between. Over the years, the cat box has lived in my bathroom, my home office and, now that I have a basement of my own, the cat box lives in an enclosure in our living room.
Who wants their living room to smell like a cat box? No one. That’s how it gets scooped so regularly. A clean cat box does not smell like a cat box. A dirty cat box is impossible to ignore when you are near it.
If we want to be nerds about it (always), this approach comes down to negative reinforcement. There is a common misconception that “negative reinforcement” means “punishment.” It doesn’t. A negative reinforcer is something noxious or annoying that goes away when you take an action. The removal of the undesirable state is a reward that reinforces the action you have taken.
If you can smell the cat box, it is unpleasant. Shoveling biowaste is also unpleasant, but it is short-lived. If you go through that short ritual, the smell is eliminated. Eliminating the ongoing negative state is enough of an incentive to do a task you will never want to do.
This generalizes beyond cat boxes, by the way. Keep the problems you will never want to solve (and yet must) front and center. Eventually, as with the smell of a dirty litter box, it’s more appealing to just do the thing than to continue ignoring it.
*NEVER buy at the top of your budget if you can possibly avoid it. Things will break, YOU are the one who has to fix it, and you will have new expenses that you could not even conceive of when renting (e.g., This summer, I paid an arborist to inject my elm trees with fungicide. I expected that the furnace would need replacing, but “tree vaccination” did not even blip on my radar as a thing).
**The only cat pee issues I have dealt with in 35+ years of cats are filed under what I would call “editorializing.” The kitten I got when I was six was an outdoor cat. He got FIV when he was eight and promptly became an indoor cat. He had Opinions about it. We worked out a system where I would leave my towel on the floor after I showered, he would pee on it while I was at school to protest his treatment, I would come home and wash it with Borax, and all was right with the world. He stopped doing that, eventually, and lived happily to the age of 16.
TL;DR: If your cat is peeing outside the litter box, check that there isn’t an obvious environmental reason (such as a disgusting litter box or inability to get to the litter box). If you can’t solve it there, take them to the vet. Cats are tidy creatures, and they don’t like that smell either. Also, Borax is excellent for getting cat pee out of anything washable.