To flush or not to flush?

Can you put cat poo or litter down the toilet? This question has been on my mind for a while now – for a few different reasons.

I was remembering the heyday of Litter Secret – a silicone granule cat litter that was such a miracle it soaked up urine and you hardly ever had to change it. You just scooped out the poop and, according to many clients, then flushed that poop down the toilet. Apparently, you could even flush the granules. Down the human toilet?!

Now, a number of issues exist in the top selling points of this type of litter, but it was super popular in the clinic I worked in. It was ordered only by the pallet, and people would then come in and buy 10 to 15 bags at a time to make sure they never ran out. This meant a lot of people were flushing a lot of cat poop down their loo.

Small print

Is this a real problem, or am I creating a poo hill from a boblet?

I recall reading the Litter Secret bag carefully and couldn’t see anywhere that it said to flush the poop down the toilet, and it definitely didn’t say you could – or should – flush the granules. In fact, I have no idea where the clients got their information from, but the idea of flushing cat poop down human toilets seems still a relatively common one – so should anyone be doing this?

From reading around the subject, it would appear not – specifically, because the water and sewage systems are set up for human use, and cannot kill any Toxoplasma gondii present in cat faeces. Even contaminated, flushable litter shouldn’t go down the toilet for the same reason.

As we become more aware of what we shouldn’t be flushing down our toilets, is it time to call a halt to cat poop flushing?

Is it really flushable?

This leads on to the other issue with cat litter – if it’s designed to clump around pee then it’s unlikely to suddenly disintegrate in the presence of plain water. I’m happy to be proved wrong if there is such a thing as a safe flushable cat litter, but I think – rather like “flushable” wipes – it’s a bit of a misnomer.

So, it would seem flushing cat poop or cat litter is not safe or legal in any way.

What to do?

This leaves a client conundrum. We know that, due to legislation, cat poop from the vet clinic needs to be handled as clinical waste, but what of our clients? While vet clinic poop goes for incineration, which may or may not be environmentally friendly, potentially our clients are making a much bigger and possibly deadlier environmental impact.

Is it time to advise clients that flushing poop and cat litter isn’t the way to go, and that they need to brave the boblets and put them in their bin, and maybe take that bin bag out a bit more often?

Caring for pets isn’t the most environmentally friendly thing to do, but making sure we don’t allow our clients to unwittingly pollute the sewage system and waterways must be a good move.