Charles Mingus’ guide to toilet training your cat
Attempting to train your cat to do anything other than eat and sleep is like trying to get your grandparents to use an air fryer. In other words, it is a pointless task. Cats are creatures of habit, but they are also incredibly self-sufficient and often rebellious. When it comes to the world of cats, you must fight fire with fire. So, in order to train an inherently rebellious cat, you must be something of a rebel yourself. Perhaps this explains why the revolutionary jazz musician Charles Mingus apparently had so much success in getting his feline friends to follow orders.
Mingus was an utterly essential figure within the jazz movement, particularly during the 1950s. His pioneering use of avant-garde tactics and improvisational composition forever changed the lineage of the genre, and throughout his long and illustrious career, the multi-instrumentalist worked alongside such iconic figures as Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. Although Mingus sadly passed away at the age of only 56, he left behind an incredible musical legacy and a discography which continues to be celebrated to this day. His legacy, however, is not entirely limited to the music world.
Back in 1954, as Mingus was reaching the pinnacle of his career, he wrote and published a self-help guide entitled The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat – his musical talents clearly did not translate to the creation of puns. Now, cats usually prefer to do their business outside, where they will most often bury their excreta themselves, without any need for human involvement or interaction. However, for apartment dwellers and owners of ‘indoor’ cats, litter trays seem to be the only option. At least, that was the case until Charles Mingus got involved.
Mingus’ guide involves four seemingly simple steps to toilet train your cat, removing any need for a litter box. The first step, somewhat counterintuitively, is to fashion your own homemade litter box using the famously water-resistant material, cardboard. Crucially, though, the litter box must be filled with torn-up newspaper rather than cat litter. As Mingus puts it, “When the time comes, you cannot put sand in a toilet.” According to the musician, once the cat gets used to this contraption, you should start moving the litter box around the room, increasingly close to the bathroom.
Once your litter box has made it into the bathroom, you should start trimming the edges of the cardboard down, essentially opening up the box to the surrounding environment. From there, you should place the box on top of the toilet and, once the cat gets used to it, cut a hole in the bottom of the cardboard – essentially making a cat-sized training potty. If you have succeeded thus far, then Mingus claims, “At this point, you will realise that you have won. The most difficult part is over.”
Once you have achieved the ’cardboard sheet with a hole in it’ stage of the training process, it is simply a case of removing the cardboard and letting the cat adapt to using the toilet freely. According to the jazz star, it took only a month to train his own cat, Nightlife, using this process.
However, from Mingus’ writing in the help guide, it is unclear whether Nightlife was a super-intelligent cat or a man in a cat costume. “Don’t be surprised if you hear the toilet flush in the middle of the night,” he wrote, “A cat can learn how to do it, spurred on by his instinct to cover up. His main thing is to cover up.”
So, if you have a cat, an abundance of cardboard, and a month to kill, think about employing The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat. If it does not work – heaven forbid – perhaps you could try coaxing your cat into the bathroom using the sweet jazz music of Charles Mingus himself. Either way, the bandleader should be commended both for his contributions to the jazz genre and the world of feline hygiene.
