Cats are great as pets. Especially when compared to dogs. I mean, come on... a dog, you have to take it out, walk it, then pick up it's crap and carry it home in a bag.

Cats, on the other hand, have some odd contract with humans. We provide them with a cleanish box, and they crap in it. We keep it clean, they keep using it. It really doesn't get much better than that.

At the start of the year, I had 2 cats and the litterbox situation wasn't so bad. A few scoops every so often, change the litter once a week... easy. But in March, I ended up adopting my mother's cats (note: do not promise to adopt your dying mother's cats), swelling my feline total to 5. And if you're interested in gross tonnage, we're probably pushing 70 pounds of cat. And 5 cats, or 70 pounds if you prefer to see it that way, produce a lot of crap.

Timmy the cat. Produces a fair amount of crap.

Michael Chrichton. Produces a huge amount of crap.

According to vets, the magic number of litterboxes to cats is 1:1. Since the idea of 5 boxes full of cat crap sitting around upstairs isn't exactly *my* idea of a good time, not to mention the scooping involved, I figured it was time to turn to technology.

Litterbox technology, and the first part in what should be an interesting series of posts.

I've purchased 2 "self-cleaning" litterboxes from Amazon.com, with the idea that one of the two has to work. Ideally I'd like to purchase a couple more of whichever box works best.

The first up was the Omega Paw Self cleaning litterbox. This isn't a totally automatic system, as you can see in the description, you do have to turn and tilt it, and then the cat crap ends up in a drawer.

The Omega Paw was the first to arrive, and I quickly got to work putting the sucker together.

Easy assembly my ass. Sure it looks easy, but when you're staring at 3 pieces of plastic and wondering how this is going to sort cat turds and drop them in a magic drawer, you want to make sure you get the thing put together correctly.

The finished product looks like a normal box. Except it cleans itself. After assembling it, I went off for dinner and a movie. After the movie, I had to run up and see if any of my brave cats had tried it yet. They had, so I did the whole tilt and drop thing.

And guess what? The box really worked. I shit you not. So far, for the 6 hours I've had the thing out, no complaints.

Stay tuned for Mystery LitterBox #2, and some OmegaPaw in action video!