I was at Trader Joe’s today when I saw pine litter sitting on the shelf.
Pine litter? Never heard of it before.
So I picked it up, read the package and thought pine didn’t sound so bad. Fresh pine definitely smells better than whatever perverse alchemy happens with crystal litter designed to overwhelm the olfactory senses with a vague air freshener scent.
But, I thought, it’s probably not a good idea to switch up cat litters on my Buddy, especially so suddenly. I put the bag back on the shelf.
Then again, Buddy has been remarkably tolerant of every different cat litter I’ve tried. He didn’t bat an eye when I switched from clay to crystal, or when I switch brands. I picked up the bag again.
So I bought the pine litter, brought it home and just filled the little guy’s litter box with it a few minutes ago.
Ruh roh! The pine pellets are big, much bigger than litter granules. And filling up the litter box took the entire bag. I’m worried. Is Bud gonna tolerate this? Will he take to it, or did I just condemn myself to scrubbing cat poop off the hardwood floors tomorrow morning?
I’d also forgotten to consider the fact that Bud likes to dig, dig, dig like he’s tunneling to China. It doesn’t look like he can do that with the pine.
On the plus side, the litter does smell like fresh cut wood, and that’s a definite improvement.
For now the king is sitting next to me on the couch. Nature will call before bed time, and I shall have my answer. Let’s hope it’s not poop on the floor.
Pain In The Bud 
We tried pine litter, wheat, paper pellets, crystals, and just about everything else. What we use now is clay litter in the to robo litter boxes and Arm & Hammer cloud in the 3 regular little boxes . Seems to be working out well. For the record I also tried wheat litter or was it corn, That was scented with lilocks. The cats weren’t very impressed but I was thrilled to be Smelling flowers instead of cat pee and cat poop.But like you if the boys didn’t like the literal with using I would dump it all out and get them something they liked. And afterwards I’d have to give them treaties. Who trained who?
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They do a good job training us. 🙂 I don’t believe I’ve ever tried Arm & Hammer litter. There was an A&H litter additive that I tried a few times. It was supposed to further kill odor and keep the box fresher, and it seemed to work well.
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I’ve been using a half and half mix of pine litter and regular litter for 6 months now. There are good and bad qualities. In my area, I bought it at Tractor supply and it was cheap at 40 lbs. for $5.99. It was in the horse bedding section.
The bad thing, it’s not scoopable. The pellets are too big to go through the litter shovel so I scrape out a lot of unused pellets along with the crumbly peed on stuff. I use a big bean spoon to get the crumbly stuff.
My cats didn’t bat an eye and took to it immediately. Using regular litter as the bottom layer seems to make the chore faster. Good luck with this.
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Can’t beat 40 lbs for $5.99. Thanks for the tip about leaving a bottom layer of regular litter. How many boxes do you have for the three of them? Do they share at all, or do they each have their own?
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I’ve been using Dry-Den Animal Bedding for cat litter. It comes in 40 lb bags. A pelletized wood product meant for sheep, goats and other large animals, it works well as cat litter and is compostable.
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Interesting. Does it trap odors? And how well can your cats dig/bury in it?
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It is formulated with zeolites to trap odors. They do dig and bury their stools, when they feel like it. Some of the cats work at that, others let them sit on top and take off. It is far more trackless than clay, but not perfect.
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Thanks. I’ll look for some and do a blog post about it.
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