My Identity Crisis in the Cat Litter Isle
I’m cat-sitting for a friend, and I had to buy cat litter for the first time in my life. Finding the pet aisle and getting a box seemed like a simple enough quest.
The supermarket complicated my simple quest with an exorbitant range of litters: extra hygienic, super smell absorbent, sensitive, small-grained, in a white, blue, grey or purple color that changes, according to levels of contamination. Looking down on the images of serene, uncongested cats, I felt dizzy.
How would I choose, which type of litter I liked for the cat to shit on? Through my litter haze, it dawned on me, that the focus here was on “I” — I was choosing the litter that would suit my needs. Obviously, the cat doesn’t really care, and I was left to indulge myself in the pet aisle.
That aisle is an obscure place: An entire shelf of products, partially designed and marketed for human buyers, even though we are not using them. It’s baffling that we are the target audience of this excrement extravaganza, but not the consumer.
Of course, I’m not mad that I can buy litter from the supermarket. I think it’s nice that the cat does its business in a box, instead of on the floor. I think it’s magnificent how the material clumps up, when it gets wet. I love how magical, practical and convenient that is. I briefly thought about googling how the litter does that.
Hey Google: What’s the chemistry behind clumpy cat litter?
What actually bugs me, is that something as mundane as cat poop, needs to be commodified and fetishized. It bugs me that I need to think about what type of pet owner I want to be, how the products I buy for the cat define me as a person. Do I want to be the extravagant cat owner with pink cat litter? Do I want to be the laissez-faire cat owner that gets the no-brand litter? What experience do I want to get out of the cat doing its business?
Finally, I decided to identify as a clean cat mom who gets “hygienic” and “odour absorbent” litter, in a calming white-blue carton. My litter had laundry detergent energy, because I want to show that even though the house is full of cat hair and the litter box smells hazardous, I do literally have my shit together. Let the clumpy cat litter show, that my life is not shaped by that animal. I am the controller of nature and while I reap the benefits of companionship, I will not allow it to get messy.
Ultimately, the unique selling point for the cat litter with laundry detergent energy was how it enabled me in my typical human hybris of being separate from nature. With €2.50 of white granulate, I could say “I’m outside the food chain and your Number 2 will do as I say.”
What bugs me is that the hygienic cat litter is exploiting my megalomania for financial gain, and I’m not sure if I want Big Litter to have that kind of power.