Preach’n The Gospel Of …Cat Litter?

So once again, with summer in full swing, the bears are roaming the neighborhood in search of easy meals.  Often this proves to be in the form of trash in people’s cans.  And once again, this comes with its inherent problems and dangers.  Bears that become accustomed to viewing humans as a source of food can and often do escalate their behaviors and can become dangerous.  This almost always leads to either an injury or death for either or both human and bear.  Just a week or two ago, one was shot after breaking into a car to get at some food that was inside.  Today, a sow and three cubs were shot after ripping into tents in a campground by our neighborhood.  Occupied tents, I am told.  This is a known high traffic area for bears.

I suspect that the most recent bear casualties were the ones that have been repeatedly seen in our immediate neighborhood.  Last Saturday night, they came through our street at least 3 times that I am aware of.  I am aware of it because our dogs are quick to complain when the perimeter is breached, they are good dogs who are useful like that, and I am equally quick to see why they are fussing.   That night I actually called the police–a large bear was climbing up on the  neighbor’s car!   I informed the 911 dispatcher what was going on and mentioned that they had been coming here several times that night and that needless to say, in addition to the obvious problems, it was denying me of a good night’s sleep and that if necessary I would go outside and shoot it just so I could go back to bed but that I’d really prefer that they took care of it since, among other things, they get paid to.   They agreed to send someone out, which they did rather quickly, but of course the bear had moved on by then….only to return again at 4 am.  The next day, the street had an abundance of overturned cans with their no longer appetizing bits of meals strewn about for the humans to clean up.  🙁

As you likely can guess, the mantra of the officials is that nobody should put their trash out until trash day and they will issue fines, etc.  OK.  I get it.  Don’t feed the bears.  Sorry, Booboo, no pic-a-nic basket for you.  All well and good except for one blatant problem.  Most of the housing here lacks any secure place to store garbage.  So those homeowners, for the most part, do not have many options.  Bear resistant cans are available from the trash collection company.  There is a fee, but not much of one.  The problem is there is a waiting list.  I’m told it is a rather long list.  This of course, makes little sense to me.  The cans are manufactured.  They order them.  They pass the cost of them on to the customers.  So why not order a bunch and make them the default can for areas like ours with a known bear population?   I mean, if we have identified that bears getting into garbage is the problem and we’ve identified a mitigation for it…..why is this still a problem?  Really. It’s not rocket science.

About this time I should introduce some of my other furry friends.  Although primarily dog people, we like cats too.  Presently our cats now live with our daughter, but when the three of them were in our home I made an accidental discovery.  When throwing away a bag of horrible nasty smelly make you wanna puke cat litter, the bag broke.  Fortunately it broke when placed into the trash can and spilled it’s contents over the garbage rather than over me.  I still issued forth a few choice words, because that’s what I do.  Profanity is, at times, an artform I choose to work in.  On some level, I enjoy it.  So in addition to some newly minted terminology not fit to print here, I now had a can of garbage topped with several day’s worth of 3 cats piss and poop.  How appetizing.  NOT!

Apparently not appetizing for the bears either.  The next time we had bears moving through, they would come tear up the neighbors trash…..walk up and sniff at ours…then abruptly turn away from the stench and immediately run to the next house to dine on something that would be more tasty than the offerings at our place.  And who could blame them?  That crap’s nasty!  So the cats, indirectly, became good at deterring the local ursine population.  After this, I began intentionally dumping the cat litter over the trash each week.  Thus far, the bears have left our can alone.  Our home may even have a negative star rating from the Ursine Diner’s Club.  So be it.

This year, with our daughter and the cats no longer in the house, we lack the steady supply of used cat litter unless we go get it from her house…..  But we discovered something else.  I’ve never considered myself particularly “green” but I try to be conscious of what I’m using and how I’m using it.  Apparently, Elizabeth and I only generate about one bag of kitchen trash in a typical week.  Much less than many others do, I suppose.  The chickens no doubt help since they will happily eat kitchen scraps in exchange for eggs.  But in anycase, by the time our kitchen can gets really full it is usually just about time to put the trash out for pickup….thus minimizing the time it sits outside to attract Yogi and his friends.  Lacking the used kitty litter, I’ve found pouring a little ammonia on it seems to have similar results.

So, until which time as the trash collection company decides to supply the bear resistant cans….or until winter when the bears go down for a nap, try minimizing what you must discard and try making your waste cat litter do “double doody” by serving as a repellant.  You have to throw it out anyway, might as well have it serve a purpose.