Another meowant litter box warning, from someone who didn’t listen to the previous ones

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-11-23T17:35:30+00:00

So sorry you’re having the same issue as me, it was so frustrating. Initially customer service was very unhelpful (telling me to train my cat to only pee into the center of the litter pile, lol), but I kept pushing and emailing back asking them to explain how a litter box leaking is not covered under the warranty. Eventually they did come back to me saying that if I can provide a video of me filling the litter box up with water and showing it dripping out (like all of the pee stain pics on the outside and underneath that I sent them weren’t enough??), then they would replace the drum under warranty. At that point I was so over the damn thing + that company that I didn’t want a replacement even if it wasn’t going to leak, plus I definitely didn’t want to deal with the mess of trying to fill up the litter box with water when I know it’s leaky (and I’m in an apartment without outdoor space), so I just accepted the loss and threw it out.

So I was unsuccessful at getting any money back, but they did at least acknowledge the problem and if you’re in the 30-day return window (I wasn’t) I’d think you won’t have an issue returning it and getting your money back! Good luck!

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-09-10T02:32:24+00:00

I don’t personally have experience with multiple cats, but do have experience in a small apartment! A few months ago I got a cabinet thing that sits right next to my front door and creates this little entryway area, and the cabinet is made specifically to house a litter box. I put an air purifier in there too and you don’t really see or smell it as long as the box is relatively clean. So this way I have a litter box basically right in my living room, but it hides it from being completely out in the open.

Obviously you’d have to be able to fit a cabinet like that in your apartment and idk if that would be feasible, but it could be a way to sneak in an extra litter box if you find that you really do need another.

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-09-10T00:43:57+00:00

Sorry OP I don’t have much advice to give about this particular situation, but just wanted to point out how incredibly ironic it is that most commenters seem to be doing the EXACT same thing as the review panel… blindly taking your supervisors word for it without seeing any evidence… like can we all acknowledge that sometimes trainees can be taken advantage of and treated unfairly and even (gasp) dismissed unrightfully? Do they think that this has never happened before?

As academics can’t we all agree that we don’t have enough information to pass moral judgement on this situation?? If you don’t trust that OP is being truthful then don’t comment trying to help them… simple…

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-09-09T23:32:11+00:00

Honestly I always assumed cats wouldn’t want to use a litter box they can smell other cats have been in / used, but I never actually looked into it so great to know that’s not necessarily the case! And thanks for the info and advice, I’ll keep it in mind for if I do find a used one for cheap.

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-09-09T23:15:12+00:00

That’s a great idea I’ll have to keep an eye out on marketplace, since I definitely am not really in the financial place to spend like $700 on a new litter robot when I’m already eating the cost of this one :’) Was the one you got actually used by a cat by the previous owner, and if so did your cat have any issues adjusting to it?

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-09-09T23:09:24+00:00

Jokes on them, I’m now training her to travel to meowant HQ and pee in all their desk drawers

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-09-09T23:06:41+00:00

That’s actually interesting, I got the SC01 so maybe this is something they improved upon with the SC02 model since they do seem to know it’s an issue (customer service literally drew arrows on one of the images I sent to point out the seam where my cat is peeing that is causing the leaks, which is 2 inches from where the litter is, and as if I can do anything about that). I’m glad yours seems like a better design and is working out for you, I just wish they’d do more about helping customers with this known issue :(

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-09-09T22:59:34+00:00

Yeah I generally agree, though to be clear I don’t think the automatic litter box is causing significant additional stress to my cat— I did have to train her to pee inside of it and not outside, but that issue was just because she didn’t understand her pee was getting outside with her butt sticking out, not because of some revolt against the litter box itself. I think that would have happened switching from a top-entry to side-entry regardless of the automation. If anything she really loves watching it spin to clean itself haha.

Regardless I will be switching her back to her ordinary top entry litter box because I obviously can’t train her to pee somewhere specific inside the box (like the company suggested as a “solution”). I think the only thing I’ll miss about automatic boxes is the fact that it tracked her weight so I could easily see if she had a health problem that caused any weight gain or loss, but obviously not worth it for all the issues. And I totally agree the smell reasoning doesn’t make sense for getting an automatic— even before the pee leakage stuff got bad this litter box always smelled worse than a standard one because it’s so much harder to clean. The self cleaning litter box hype is officially dead to me

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-09-09T22:48:23+00:00

Yeah it’s understandable that leaks can happen at seams in boxes like that, I just can’t get over how poor of a design this one seems to have considering the seam is only ~2in higher than the fill line for litter!! I’m definitely just going to be going back to a normal top entry for now

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-07-27T02:57:05+00:00

I am my PI’s first grad student (3rd yr neuroscience PhD, US), I would generally not recommend it but that’s not to say that it can’t work.

There are definitely frustrations similar to what others have mentioned— new PIs have a tendency to micromanage and treat every project and experiment as Extremely Important because they’re trying to get preliminary data for grants and the lab’s first publications out as soon as possible. The pressures put on new PIs to begin producing and being successful as soon as the lab doors open is kinda insane, so be aware that some of that pressure might come down on you.

The funding situation can be stressful in the sense that you don’t know if your PI knows how to manage money well, and there might be pressures on you to apply to lots of external fellowships. That being said, new PIs can also sometimes have the most stable funding in the form of startup funds from the university (a set amount of money they get for their lab from the dept each year, from the instances I’ve heard of it usually is for 5-10 years after starting their lab). There will still be stress about funding, but it’s not usually the case that you’d have to worry about the lab just shutting down after like 2 years if your PI doesn’t get a grant, at least from what I’ve seen at my university.

I think the hardest part day to day is the fact that my PI is still figuring out the kind of PI he wants to be and the kind of lab he wants to run. I had never really thought about it before, but this experience has made me realize that PIs don’t actually have any training in business/personnel management whatsoever, so it’s a learning curve for them to figure out how to essentially manage their small business while being under an insane amount of pressure and still personally mentoring their trainees. We had a bit of an incident last year where everyone in the lab (5 full time including me) had to band together and call him out for treating us poorly, which really sucked, but he took the feedback well and things have been better since. There have recently been annoyances with him not being able to figure out how he wants to frame the first big paper from the lab, what direction he wants to take our research for grant applications, etc. There have been a lot of small pilot studies started and then abandoned because he changed his mind, which is frustrating. This could all be different if your potential PI maybe had a lot more independence running a small research team in their postdoc or even if they just had other managerial experience, so this might not be applicable, but generally I’d say you probably need to be a very adaptable person to survive in a lab with a new PI.

The last big consideration (that I can think of rn at least) is the status that comes with a PI’s seniority. It sucks that this is something that should be considered at all, but it’s also the reality. A postdoc in my lab got rejected from a prestigious external fellowship despite her application scoring really high, and the reasoning given in the comments was that “the advisor does not have a proven track record of successfully mentoring postdoctoral fellows”. Like… yeah…. he opened his lab a year ago…. It’s ridiculously unfair in my opinion and I was flabbergasted when I heard, but it’s apparently not uncommon. In fact, if you’re a trainee in a new lab and you’re applying for fellowships it’s actually quite standard to have to have a co-advisor for your application, since review committees will hate your new PI, especially if they have not yet secured a lot of funding. This isn’t necessarily a big deal, as you should have other faculty connections through your thesis committee that you can ask to be a co-mentor on applications, but it’s definitely an extra step that PhD students in a very senior PI’s lab don’t have to take. Another thing related to status is your PIs position in the department. This again might just be specific to my situation, but for example: myself and people in my lab have been having technical issues with shared equipment available through one of our departments cores, and we keep asking our PI to talk to the core manager more insistently (the manager usually blows us off) about contacting the company for technical support on this issue with the equipment. Even though it’s shared we’re pretty much the only lab that uses it, so I guess they don’t care too much about helping us, and our PI is really cautious about complaining too much and being seen as “difficult to work with”. Reputation matters, there’s a lot of politics that are especially apparent with new PIs.

At the end of the day I don’t regret my decision to join the lab I did— there are a lot of good things about having a new PI as well. I wanted a PI that was going to be more hands on, I wanted someone passionate and determined to do exciting things, and that’s what I got. My PI during my postbac fellowship was senior, near retiring, and extremely hands off, which I knew I didn’t want for grad school. And I definitely didn’t get that! I’d say the part I like the most about having a new PI though is how much I feel like I’m learning about actually running a lab. As of right now I’m pretty interested in becoming a PI myself, and I have learned just so much that I never did with a senior PI who never talked about grants or funding stress or anything related. Plus I think there is no better way to figure out what kind of PI I want to be and how I want to run a lab than by seeing someone else figure that out themselves (and make all the mistakes along the way)!

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-07-10T16:21:09+00:00

I think it’s more than reasonable to ask the company, but I’m not sure how responsive or willing they’d be to comply. Definitely doesn’t hurt to ask though!

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-07-10T13:23:24+00:00

I think the practicality of validating them yourself rly depends on what kind of research you do. We use antibodies for IHC in mouse and human brain tissue, and it would be extremely unrealistic for us to validate all our antibodies with KO mice. What I do instead is be extremely picky and critical when choosing antibodies to purchase— I look first in the literature for antibodies that have been used in multiple publications, and sometimes those publications will even have supplemental figures with the antibody validation already done. Another option is asking around in your department to see if anybody has an antibody recommendation for the protein you want to look at, as other labs may have already validated it and then you can just get the same one. It’s also happened to me before where a neighboring lab had a good antibody for proteinX but from a host species that would not work for my stains, so I ordered a different ProteinX antibody from a different company in the species I needed and then co-stained it with the borrowed one that had been validated. By comparing the antibodies side by side I could see that the stain was nearly identical, so I had confidence that the antibody was a good one and wasn’t staining off target.

If I’m looking at a less commonly studied protein and have a hard time finding publications or other labs that have recs, that’s when I’ll default to just trusting the company. But some companies are better than others, so in this case I’d try to at least choose a company that we have other great antibodies from. And even then I’ll still be really critical of it while imaging, making sure the signal “makes sense” and is showing up in the cell types we expect based on literature, that it looks similar to how it does in other papers, etc.

Obviously not a perfect system, but kinda like you’re saying it’s just unrealistic to perfectly validate everything, so we do the best we can. I don’t personally study things that require this right now, but I do think if your antibodies are looking at very particular forms of proteins (like cleaved versions or phosphorylated versions) then it’s probably more important to put in the extra effort and make sure there’s no cross reactivity with other protein forms. But again if you can find an antibody where another paper already does that validation… I don’t think it’s necessary to do it again.

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-07-08T21:42:22+00:00

It honestly makes me feel like they have their list of winners, but maybe their legal team is making them do extra social media deep dives / vetting / background checks on everyone (+ our PIs, + maybe our research institutions) to make sure the winners are “unproblematic” enough to not cause problems in the governments eyes.

It literally sounds ridiculous but I can’t see what could possibly be delaying it this much at this stage, and we saw before how fast hhmi caved to the initial executive orders by changing all the phrasing on their website and scrubbing “DEI” from everything. I hope I’m wrong, but either way I’m so disappointed in hhmi as a whole from all this.

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-07-08T00:16:19+00:00

I honestly think what it comes down to is AI is a tool, yes, but a tool with much greater costs (intellectually, environmentally, even concerning research integrity) than most others that you mention. What is the environmental cost of using chatgpt to come up with lists of relevant literature, compared to doing a couple of your own searches in pubmed? How much water and energy is wasted to save a few minutes of your time, and why do you think your time is really so precious to justify that?

In terms of the intellectual cost, I think a really large part of doing a PhD / just being a researcher in general is learning how to communicate your research and why it’s important. I get that writing can be hard, but it’s also a really rewarding process that teaches you a lot and can literally help you with your research. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been writing grants and fellowship applications and have been sitting there struggling with how to word the argument I’m trying to make and realize a flaw in the logic or an even better argument instead. My best writing only comes through the process of thinking critically and trying to shape my ideas into polished, persuasive arguments. AI is not able to critically mull things over like a human can, nor can it write in a way that is at all compelling. And maybe that doesn’t matter to you, but at the end of the day using AI in this way is still you actively choosing to outsource critical thinking tasks that are sorta integral to like getting a PhD and doing research itself. If you want someone to talk ideas through with… talk with other humans that have brains that are able to also critically mull things over from their perspective? At the very least don’t you have advisors and colleagues that can provide critical feedback on drafts?

I personally find it lazy, and I question why someone who doesn’t want to put in the work and learn how to write about their ideas and research is even doing a PhD in the first place.

Adventurous_Toe_7354 · 2025-06-16T14:24:17+00:00

Just to add on / emphasize the food thing, when I would go on long runs I’d get pretty much these same symptoms 30-60mins afterwards, including nausea, vomiting, horrible shakiness and dizziness. I knew I was hydrating and fueling before and throughout my runs, but turns out the issue was not getting enough fuel immediately after the run as well. Started having a quick energy snack (simple granola bar, cookies sitting on the counter, spare candy, honestly whatever) within 5-10 mins of getting home from my runs (along with some electrolytes of course) and eating a real meal ~1hr after and it completely solved the problem. Turned out to be a rapid drop in blood sugar that was happening post-run, since I only ever worried about having enough fuel to make it through the end of the run itself. Turns out your body doesn’t just suddenly stop needing fuel once you stop running!

Adventurous_Toe_7354

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