How to Litter Train Your New Kitten

Cats are naturally clean animals, they don’t like to go to the toilet near places they eat or sleep and prefer a quiet, safe place to go – using this instinct while litter training is the perfect guide for new kitten owners. The amount of time it takes ranges between individuals, some kittens are just cleaner than others but on average it usually takes around 4 weeks for them to figure out where to go every time.

Kittens will start to go to the toilet themselves from 3 weeks of age, but before that they need to be stimulated by their mother. By eight weeks of age when you take them home, even if they’ve started to figure out their litter training, they’re likely still having accidents and will need a little help, especially when they move home.

Litter training a kitten isn’t that complex, it’s actually pretty straightforward since you’re just tapping into a pre-existing instinct! However, it’s important to note, cats prefer to be rather discreet when going to the toilet, choosing a place where they can easily hide it.

Houses are naturally quite limited when it comes to good places to go to the toilet. There aren’t many places your kitten can really hide their mess, so giving them a tour of their options is often all you need to do to get the ball rolling.

There will inventively be accidents along the way as they start to understand their bladder movements for the first time. Make sure you’re prepared to clean up after them and remember, there’s no need to reprimand accidents, it won’t speed their litter training up!

Before you can even start training, you have to choose where to put the litter tray. Since cats tend to try and hide when they go to the toilet, you can use this when picking a placement. Quieter areas with less footfall tend to do better. Place it in a corner so they feel less exposed, so they will be more naturally inclined to go to those spots anyway.

Make sure the litter tray is easily accessed without anything blocking it otherwise, your kitten might find somewhere that’s more easily accessed to relieve themselves. Places such as under the stairs, in the bathroom or in spare bedrooms not frequented by the household tend to work best. Your kitten won’t want to go to the toilet in the middle of the living room in front of everyone else.

There’s not much you can do to force your kitten to use their new litter tray or box, but you can encourage them to explore it. When you first bring them home, make sure you show them exactly where they are so they’re aware of their options.

Once they know where their toilets are placed, you can make use of their routine to try to predict when they might need the toilet. Kittens are like babies, it’s a cycle of eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet, with short bursts of energy to play in between. Therefore, it’s predictable to gage when they may need the toilet – pop them around or in their litter box after they have finished eating or napping to encourage them to naturally go. Eventually, if they’re used to this, they will start to take themselves off to the toilet whenever they’re done eating or sleeping.

Kittens are not complicated companions and making going to the toilet rewarding for them isn’t difficult. Pairing something they enjoy doing with something you want them to do like using the litter tray and it will make them more inclined to do it every time.

If they go to the toilet and are rewarded with a cat treat every time they finished, they’re going to be more inclined to do it again. You can even use play as a reward where any time you see them going to the toilet in the right place, you play a fun game after it. Anything they enjoy can be used as reinforcement as long as you time it right.

By tapping into your kitten’s natural cleanliness and giving them their own areas to go to the toilet, it makes sense to keep those areas as clean as possible. If litter becomes too dirty and they can’t find any clean, fresh areas to relieve themselves, they may opt to go outside the litter box and find the next best place to go which is often somewhere like behind the sofa or tucked away in a dark corner, so you don’t notice it until you smell it!

While you don’t need to change all of their litter out every day, you should always have a bag of fresh cat litter on hand so, you can regularly spot clean and scoop away dirty areas to keep it as fresh as possible and encourage your kitten to keep using it.

While litter training your new kitten isn’t particularly taxing in the way of how many things you have to do, simply offering a good choice of locations and a clean environment is the perfect start. If you get these things right from the start the litter training can be a breeze. Find everything you need to make toilet training your new kitten go smoothly in-store and online.