Do you really need a fancy litter tray for your cat?
We’ve all heard of smart speakers, smart heaters and even smart fridges, now our furry feline friends are getting in on the tech revolution.
Smart cat litter trays self-clean, stow the poo in a rubbish bag and deoderise – and they are camera-enabled so you can track your cat’s movements remotely.
RNZ executive producer Jeremy Parkinson has two cats, Maumee and the Kitten, and gave the smart trays a test run.
“It is my job, as the cat meister, to make sure that it all goes away without the rest of the family being involved. So, we've had this [smart litter box] for a week as a bit of an experiment, and we learnt things about our cats that I don't know we ever really needed to know. Now that we do know, it's kind of like we need one of these things,” Parkinson told RNZ's First Up.
Related stories:
Technology retailer PB Tech sold hundreds of the smart litter boxes last year. Product manager Joe Shi says demand is rising.
“That's because we have more pets joining our families and people will feel it's getting easier to look after a pet. Before you always need to clean up after your pets, the devices make your life easier.”
The device has sensors and cameras with facial recognition, so if you have more than one pet, it can notify your phone which one has used the litterbox.
The technology is evolving, Shi says.
The smart litter box is much bigger than a regular litter tray, it has cameras and sensors.
Ke-Xin Li
“[There are] smart cat feeders, smart cat water fountains, all those kinds of devices are going to help maintain their health and help the owner to monitor the health of their pet.”
Parkinson agrees, he found himself more interested in the interactive function of the smart litter box than the effort it saved him to clean up after Maumee and the Kitten.
One day, he found himself standing in the middle of an op-shop, talking to his cat at home.
“I got a notification that a cat had come up to the toilet. I logged on and I could see him leaving. It's got a microphone so you can hold down the button on the app and I called the cat over to the toilet and he was looking around for me and he was, where is he? And he jumped up on top of it and I was in New Lynn, nowhere near the cat. And he was like, 'where are you dad, where are you?'”
Cat chats aside, there are downsides. Compared with a regular litter tray, the smart litter box is much bigger, and costs a lot more - from $500 up to $1200.
The Kitten, however, was impressed with the new sanitary arrangements, he says.
“I think the bigger cat was a bit more suspicious of it. The little cat didn't care, he was in there, he would give it 10 out of 10.”
