Fellow cat owners (there are a lot of us, eh?): I might be wrong about this, but I believe you can have your cat(s) tested to see if they are carriers of toxoplasmosis, possibly alleviating or confirming that particular concern about your kitty compost. I never worried too much about toxo. except during my pregnancy, when my husband dutifully handled scooping/cleaning/kitty-compost-handling chores. To give slightly more detail, our current (outside of city) system is: we use pine pellet litter, we scoop poops daily and bury in designated hole (i.e. "kitty latrine") far from house/garden/well/etc. We empty the rest into a cat-litter-designated compost pile weekly, adding enough green materials to help it break down, and using the resulting compost in non-edible areas (which is somewhat challenging, as we're endeavoring to turn our entire two acres into more-or-less edible areas!). In the city the compost system was the same, but we flushed the poops. I tend not to be overly worried about pathogens, etc, and I might consider using the cat compost in an orchard area or something like that, but I still haven't brought myself to using it in the actual veggie garden. On a related note, is someone out there actually using wood pellets (meant for burning) as cat litter? It sounds a lot more economical if it is basically the same stuff, which I am imagining it is, just compressed sawdust, right? On another related, though probably wildly impractical note, I have heard (probably, tall) tales of cats trained to use the toilet! -Kristie
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