The Charles Mingus CAT-alog (1972)

I left my cat alone in the house for a few days with my housekeeper popping in to feed and entertain him. He had a little over 2 day spell on his own at the end when my housekeeper couldn't come in. When I arrived home I discovered that our housekeeper had accidentally closed off the door accessing his litter box. I searched the house looking for the mess but couldn't find anything.. until I went to the bathroom and found that he had taken upon himself to use the toilet. He's definitely gone up in my esteem since.

All to say that some cats don't need any kind of training to use the toilet.

I'm not the person you're asking but we use the same brand, the Litter Robot 3 (without wifi) and think it's great. Both our cats took to it very quickly.

It does require a small amount of maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Separating and cleaning the main pieces every 2-3 months is all I do (nothing that requires tools to disassemble, but a good 15 minutes of cleaning+vacuuming)

Our cats were always very stinky with traditional litter boxes (even on different diets) and the litter robot did cut that down significantly... but what made a huge difference was using a litter that was a combination of clay, activated carbon and silica granules (we use Biokat's Diamond Care Classic - it is expensive, previously I manually mixed in carbon+silica into cheaper clay litter with moderate success).

We only have one cat now, and only need to replace the bag once every 10 days, but even so I can't detect any cat smell in the house (and am quite sensitive to it) nor can any of my friends/family -- but they all have cats so there may well still be some base level of smell that all our noses are innured to.

To a sibling commentor's warning, neither of our cats are worried about it cycling (in fact, our sphynx races over to watch it cycle any time she hears the motor start up). It has a weight sensor as well as a pinch sensor to prevent the cat being injured in case they jump in while it's running -- so far nobody's tried to, but good to know it's there.

I found it quite good for our older cat, too: one of our cats had a bit of arthritis in later life and needed the set of steps to comfortably get up and into the litter box which does increase the already pretty significant footprint of the device. It also has an automatic low light that comes on when it gets dark that helped her get around when her eyesight was failing.

A sibling comment noted that it's pretty expensive and may not be worth the cost - I think that's probably true, although I've no regrets (and even bought a second one) because of the amount of scooping it's saved me.

I wouldn't call something hypochondria just because I personally haven't had to deal with it. It's really great that you've never had this issue and I hope you never have to, but if we're going by anecdotes, there are several in this very thread from people who have.

Diet can be a contributing factor, yes. I mention it a bit in this comment, with a link to a journal issue that talks about these issues in dogs and cats, including some information on frequency and contributing factors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29864189

Cool cat.

I love how Mingus is so in tune with how his cat (Nightlife) thinks, sensing how to encourage him, how to avoid freaking him out, how to lead him along.

Some of Mingus's best known works (Mingus Ah Um, Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, etc.) are organized group improvisations, with multiple wind instruments playing improvised lines at once. It's different from big bands like Ellington's where you have featured soloists and everybody else playing charts (even if the rhythm section does some improvising), and it's difficult to achieve balance of the various elements under such circumstances. I get a sense from this article how Mingus manages to get inside the heads of his collaborators, to keep their trust, and lead them towards a shared vision.

Did they continue using the toilet after that?