The Answer to a Question That No One Asked

Satan’s Little Fart Cloud has returned to Little Grey Shit status now that I no longer need to give her lime sulfur baths. While the smell may be gone, her freedom poses a new problem for me. Actually, it’s an old problem that has re-emerged now that all cats are now using all litter boxes.

LGS has triaditis. One of the things triaditis causes is inflammatory bowel disease. She can develop diarrhea or become constipated because of this. In order to treat her effectively, I need to know what her stool looks like. The Little Black Shit, on the other hand, does not have triaditis, but she does have abnormal bowel function, including inflammatory bowel disease. She’s on medications for this and so I also need to monitor her stool. And then there’s the Little Brown Shit, who is perfectly healthy except that she is prone to occasional constipation, so I need to make sure she’s producing on schedule.

This was less of a problem when the LGS was in quarantine, since I knew with absolute certainty what she was producing. Now though, unless I’m fortunate (and I use that term with reservation) enough to catch someone in the litter box while they’re being productive, I usually can’t identify who has left me which gift in the box. While it’s tempting to install motion detectors and cameras at all the litter boxes so I can track who’s doing what, it’s cost prohibitive. Time for action has arrived.

Last summer, when I attended the AVMA conference, I attended a lecture where the speaker offhandedly tossed off a solution to this problem. I tucked the idea into the back of my brain, and introduced it to LGS’s veterinarian last week. She was skeptical, but after conferring with her colleagues gave me the go ahead to try.

Step 1: GRATE Using a non-toxic crayon and a kitchen grater make fine shavings of the crayon. Choose a color that will have high visibility in your cat’s stool. Browns and blacks would be poor choices. I stayed away from reds as well, since I don’t want any issue of confusing the shavings with blood in the stool. I also stayed away from oranges; I feed my cats EVO (it has the highest protein to carbohydrate ration of any canned food I can find on the shelves) which has carrot in it, some of which tends to pass through the digestive tract unchanged.

Step 2: MEASURE SHAVINGS If you choose a color with high contrast, you won’t need to use much of the crayon shavings. About half a teaspoon should be sufficient for your purpose.

Step 3: MEASURE FOOD I mixed the shavings into the first feeding of the day. I was worried about palatability (crayons have a distinct odor, and cats have exquisitely sensitive noses) so I only used a little bit of food at first. If they refused to eat it, I figured I could keep mixing food into it to find out how much food I needed in order to disguise the odor.

Step 4: MIX Here’s what the two amounts mixed together looked like. Sky blue will be LBlS’s color.

Step 5: FEED Apparently my worries about palatability were for naught. LBlS was only too happy to eat the above as-is.

Now I just have to wait until tomorrow to see if I get any results.