Keeping Our Cats Safe In The Garden

Keeping our cats and kittens safe in the garden, and around household plants indoors, is an important consideration too often overlooked, unfortunately with all too common tragic results. The holidays are fast approaching and decorative plants are frequent gifts - the problem is that Grandma's basket of flowers may be deadly to your cat. Lilies, for example, are extremely poisonous to cats, and even the tiniest amount consumed can be lethal within a very short time. We all know (or at least should know) to keep our pets away from the antifreeze in the garage or the pills in the bathroom medicine cabinet, but the tragic accidental deaths of many domestic cats can also be traced to poisoning from household and garden plants.

Everyone enjoys a nice garden and having attractive houseplants in the room. Whenever we make decisions about the plants to put in our homes, we have to take the time to consider whether or not they may be harmful to our pets. The simple fact is that cats evolved with a taste for greenery. Anyone with cats knows that they will gleefully devour many household plants if given the chance, and kittens can be the worst offenders. Whether it's to calm an upset stomach, a need to find missing minerals in the diet, or just a love of the scent, it's not exactly clear why cats chew plants. But they certainly do. For this reason, we need to take care to avoid known toxic plants around our homes.

Fortunately, we don't have to become botanists to protect our cats and kittens. The ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center is a great resource; the Center also runs a national 24 hour a day hotline at (888) 426-4435 to answer questions and offer assistance in cases of a suspected pet poisoning. As a useful guide, the Center has an online list of known toxic plants. Fortunately, their list of nontoxic plants is a lot longer. These lists were very helpful recently when we were working with our landscape architect to design our backyard garden. While our cats, of course, won't randomly wander about trying to find the most toxic plant in the room to eat, why take an unnecessary chance? It's entirely possible to design an attractive garden, and to have a large selection of beautiful plants in our homes, without putting our cats at risk.

Just a reminder: we are not veterinarians and cannot offer specific medical advice. If you think your cat has been poisoned by ingesting plant materials around your home, please don't waste time by writing us - immediately get your cat to an emergency clinic!

CatGenie Review Update

Much to our surprise, our CatGenie review has turned out to be one of the most popular pages here at FosterKittens! I guess this only goes to show the effect of unintended consequences, that or maybe just the strength of the desire of cat owners to find alternatives to the traditional litter box. Since we've had so much interest in our CatGenie from friends and neighbors, it seemed time for a progress report.

Since first installing our GatGenie in the powder room this past winter, we've had no major problems and our kitties have adapted fairly well. We were initially concerned when one of our adult cats at first turned up her nose, but she seems to have fully adjusted to her fancy, self-cleaning litter box. And now, thanks to the new side wall and dome attachments we recently added, she can scratch to her heart's content without flinging nearly as many of the biodegradable plastic granules around as before. I think the addition of the new dome attachments is a big improvement over the original open design - some cats like scratching the hood on their litter box after all - and all of them seem to manage to toss around as much litter as they can without one. In short, due to the lack of serious problems and the addition of the new dome, I'm pleased to report that our original recommendation still stands.