Many are the ways the Litter Maid and my wifes cat have made my life a living hell. I blame the cat more than the Litter Maid, but heed this warning and don't say I didn't warn you. When the darn thing works it's great, when it doesn't watch out!

My wife has a cat, his name is Slinky, he is a rather large cat, but he is not bigger than other cats of his type, don't ask me what type, I don't have a clue. We first discovered the Litter Maid about two years ago and for the first few months it was perfect, it worked without a hitch. We were free from kitty litter trauma except for emptying the dumping tray with kitty stuff in it; I left that for the wife to do.

Then one day the darn thing kept running and running and it just wouldn't clean the kitty stuff, the cat was annoyed, we were annoyed. Then we noticed there was a wire hanging from the thing so we sent it back and they promptly sent us another and then another and then another. We had to continually send them back because our psychotic cat would find a way to break each one and we would let the company know and they would send a replacement that would work for a few weeks and then the cat would destroy it.

The company never became annoyed and they kept sending us replacement machines and like an episode of Itchy and Stratchy from the Simpsons, that darn cat kept destroying them in new and horrible ways. Finally we could take no more and we gave up on the Litter Maid experiment and chalked it up to cat, machine incompatibility. We thought that was the end of the story, but two things happened that would re-introduce the Litter Maid into our lives. We went to a wedding recently and a friend mentioned that he had the Litter Maid and that it was a Godsend. He went on and on, he has five, count them five cats and they all use the Litter Maid. He has been using the same Litter Maid for over a year and it literally saved his life. This emboldened my wife to take another stab at a peace accord between the Litter Maid and our psychotic Slinky.

We were able to get in on sale at K-Mart about 9 months ago give or take a month. Here is a transcript of our journey.

Week One: The styling is different and it looks like the design is much better now, Slinky even seems to be resigned to his fate and he uses it frequently, maybe a little too frequently, by the end of the week we had kitty litter clay. We called the company to make sure we were using the right kitty litter and we proceeded to the second week with high hopes.

Week Two: The new kitty litter did not make a difference. This time instead of clay the litter had clumped on the claws of the machine and then formed clay we had to refill the bin several times that week. We finally got the clue that maybe it was the cat and we discovered that he had an over active thyroid, so after $1,300 in vet bills we were able to resolve the kitty litter clay thing. We still have problems with the litter, cat and machine incompatibility for the most part it is easier on us than a traditional kitty litter box. Yes our cat is doing fine now, but the very machine he sought to destroy saved his life.

The bottom line: Get it on sale, give it a shot and I'm sure it will work better for you than it did for us. Now heed my warning, at the first signs of trouble cut your loses and just let it go, dump it into the trash and be done with it. I've got to recommend you try it, because when it works and sometimes ours still does, life is beautiful.


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