It’s true. I have more than a passing interest in poop. All poop. Yours, mine, all the waste from wombat to whale. So I guess it stands to reason my new kittens Wally and Clifford are on board too. Call us afeceonados.

My first cat (Saint) Larry had a great attitude. She wasn’t fussy. She pooped wherever she happened to be when the urge hit, and it rarely hit in the litter box. Since she apparently never drank water, cleaning up after her was as chaste as picking up crackers. One almost considered not bothering to wash hands afterwards if one was busy. “Put her food dish next to it,” the experts intoned. “No one wants to poop near their food.” Larry would poop right next to her food dish if that’s where she was when the mood struck. Call it gross, but she had an admirable serenity about life.

Second Cat Tater did everything in the right place but when it came to flushing, she was all instinct and no strategy. She’d scratch the wall, or scratch the floor, or scratch the box the litter came in, but nothing ever got covered.

These kittens, though. If I don’t know where in the house they are, all I have to do is approach the litter boxes and there they are, spot on the Johnny. Clifford in particular will get right in the box when I bring out the scoop, and produce a massive turd like he’s landing the Hindenburg. It needs to snap in two or it will elevate him right up off the ground. He’ll do that three more times that same day. Clifford is a walking expandable poop tube in a fur wrapper, and to get any more shit out of him you’d have to start rolling him up tightly from the head end.

It’s impressive. I’ve been wondering what these two are doing with the voluminous amounts of kitten food they’re hoovering, and now I know. Every day they’re making an inch more Wally and Clifford and a foot of poop. If human kids grew that fast, we’d have them signed up for the NBA at nine months.

The experts say you should have at least two litter boxes for two cats, if not a third. I thought that might be excessive, but now I know why. You need to fake them out with one box while you quick-scoop the other one. Both cats seem to take offense at the poop scoopage, and keep trying to nab it back out of the scoop.

Fine. It’s weird, but it’s their poop. They aren’t the first roommates I’ve ever had who wanted me to leave their shit alone. It’s a shame I now have to lift the scoop so high above their heads that they end up dusted in slightly soiled litter. This, I told them, is why the Queen never comes over for tea anymore. “I’m dead now” is just a polite fiction.

Well, all of this was more attention to cat poop than I had been accustomed to, but within the bounds of reason. Unfortunately, Wally is also interested in mine. Let me tell you something: the first time you sit on the potty and feel whiskers at your nethermost nethers, you mind goes a dozen places at once, none of them good. It never occurred to me that there was room behind me for an entire cat to stick her nose in what I still like to think of as my personal business, thank you.

That’s the kind of thing that probably sealed it for the Queen.