The Behavioural Impact on Cats during a Transition from a Clay-Based Litter to a Plant-Based Litter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current guidelines recommend transitioning cats from one litter product to another over 6 days to minimize stress. The study objective was therefore to test these guidelines using 16 adult domestic cats (2 cohorts of 8) by observing behavioural changes associated with elimination throughout the litter transition. Cats were transitioned from a clay-based litter (CLAY) to a plant-based litter product (PLANT) over 6 days (period 1) via an incremental replacement of CLAY with PLANT. All cats then remained on PLANT for 8 days (period 2). This same transition process was executed for both cohorts, and litter box behaviours were observed via remote recording. Urination, defecation, cover, and dig behaviours were not different between periods 1 and 2 (p > 0.05). Sniffing frequency was greater in period 2 than period 1 (p < 0.05); however, during the litter transition (period 1), cats sniffed the litter boxes being transitioned from CLAY to PLANT more often and for longer than they did for the boxes consisting of only PLANT (p < 0.05). These data suggest that 6 days may be an adequate amount of time to transition a cat to a new litter, although successful transition may also be specific to the types of litters investigated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".