Product Review: World’s Best Cat Litter
I have to admit, I don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about cat litter. Some of this is by design- when I was pregnant in 2004, I told my husband he had to change the cat litter because otherwise MY ENTIRE PREGNANCY WAS AT RISK (which, by the way, is not entirely true- one needs to take precautions, true, but changing litter during pregnancy isn’t an automatic Toxoplasmosis infection.)
Anyway, I left out that last part because I was happy to have an excuse to hand over litter duties, and I just never took them back. So here we are, that baby is now five, and my husband still does most of the litter changing. He has in this time become a bit of a litter connoisseur, dictating with precision which qualities makes a good or a poor choice with the snobbiness of a Beluga caviar taster.
Smell, dust, scatter, all of these things factor into his poorly described algorithm, and I simply just buy a new container of litter every week and hope I picked the right one. “What eeez theeees?” said with a sneer meets a bad choice, one a little too dusty. “I hate zee marbles!” he declares when I tried a container of crystals. I’m still a little unclear on which one he actually liked, but that’s OK.
I tried some of the more environmentally-friendly litters a while back, paper ones and pine ones, and found them soggy and a bit smelly, so I’ve been sticking to clumping litter ever since. Then the people over at World’s Best Cat Litter sent me a sample bag to try out. Our resident litter expert (aside from Apollo) was dubious, but agreed to give it a shot.
I asked my co-worker/ cat expert what she thought of it, and she told me that it is all she uses in her house of 13 cats. That alone was encouraging. I guess I haven’t been keeping up with litter technology evolution, but this litter wasn’t at all what I was expecting.
- It’s a corn-based litter- so it avoids the problem of silica inhalation for both pets and people (which is a very legitimate concern, especially with the abundance of feline asthmatics.)
- It’s the same approximate size and shape of clumping litter, so my cat accepted it with zero problem.
- It clumps very well. Their claim that urine clumps are smaller than traditional litter did hold in our house.
- I also agree with the claim that it doesn’t sink to the bottom and create glued-to-the-box clumps.
- It smells like, well, corn. It has a bit of an organic smell to it which is not at all disagreeable and not chemical-ly like a lot of scented litters. After one week of daily scooping, it still smelled fine.
- It’s biodegradable, and can be flushed in some locations (not in California!)
So help me god, I when I first opened the bag I sat there just smelling it trying to decide what type of hay it reminded me of before realizing that I was sitting in the garage sniffing cat litter. That’s the kind of thing you usually find neighbors talking about on the evening news. Then each day this week I actually stuck my face waaaaay too close to the box trying to be offended by the smell. It didn’t happen. Look, I’m not saying I want a perfume version of the stuff or anything, but so far as odor goes- I’m hard to please, and this worked very, very well.
The official statement from my husband, on the other hand, is “It doesn’t scatter dust all over my garage,” which is apparently his number one concern. High praise from Mr. Particular.
I’m more impressed than I thought I would be. It really is a great product- and widely available at pet stores. I’m convinced- we’re making the change!
