Cause & Effect: Why Is It So Hard to See?

I suppose if it were really very simple to see the cause and effect relationship between events, scientists and other people who analyze data would have no job.  Still, when you do figure put the causal relationship, the cause can be so simple and so small that you wonder how it could have eluded your observation for so long and how such a small thing can have such a huge effect on your life.

Let me give an example, the effects first.

For the past year, I have been having major allergies.  I mean, major (for me).  And I was really perplexed because I am not a person to have seasonal or terrible allergies in general.  The thing was, it wasn't even seasonal allergies.  It was year-round, constant sneezing, congestion, and sometimes whole days with my nose running uncontrollably.  It was so bad, I actually took Loratadine for the first time in my life.  And when my friend recommended a sinus kit that clears out your sinuses by squirting warm water and salt up your nose, I even tried that.  Unfortunately, neither solution really worked.  I was still left with a stuffed up nose and piles of used tissue papers on my desk and bedstand every day.

When it first started happening, I wondered if it might be that I was allergic to my cats.  You see, I had had one cat for a while, but I had recently adopted another.  Two cats, perhaps, was too much for me to take.  And my allergies did coincide somewhat with the timing of the new kitty.  That was my first fear.  But as it turned out, my fear was unfounded.  I got a cold (which I never thought to be a good thing) and after the cold, my allergies ended for some time.  I could breathe fresh air.  That was quite weird and quite nice.  But the allergies soon returned and doubly bad.

I then thought perhaps that it was the air around me.  Somehow the air had gotten worse.  I wondered if perhaps my landlord had planted a new flower or plant that I was allergic too, and that now I was suffering because of it.  I couldn't do anything for that though.  And so it seemed, I had just gotten allergies, and there was nothing to be done but to suffer through it with a box of tissues, an air filter, and an allergy pill when I was really desperate.

Around the same time, I noticed that my boy cat would pee outside the automatic litter box.  I thought it might be his aversion to the self-cleaning rotation of it or the loudness of the motor, so I put in a regular box.  He peed outside that too.  I worried enough to tell my sister who then wondered if it might be a urinary tract infection.  I worried enough about that idea to ask my vet, who said that it was common for cats not to like automatic litter boxes.  And it wasn't like he always peed outside.  It was just sometimes.  I rarely caught him, but I could always smell it when he did.  I wondered if the boxes were too dirty for him, so I cleaned them up.  He still peed outside.  I wondered if maybe he just smelled the old pee and so he wanted to pee in those places.  I read that cats do that.  It was usually the same places, after all.  And so I tried everything to get the smell of the old pee out, even buying a bottle of Simple Solution, which I like and like the smell of, but sure enough, my kitty would go back to peeing in his same spots. 

Now that I've revealed the effects, could you guess at the cause?  Yes.  One cause.

It wasn't until my family pointed out to me how much litter dust my kitties were tracking around their house and when my nose kept running at their place -- when it usually only runs at my place -- that I realized that it might just be the litter causing my congestion.

You see, two years ago, I bought this new automatic litter box, a Litter Robot, and a new litter brand, World's Best Cat Litter, to go with it.  The first year I had the new box and litter, I had no allergies.  That was when the box worked.  The second year, when the box was broken, I realized, is when my allergies started.  The litter was fine in the Litter Robot, because there wasn't much litter and it was constantly filtering it, so there was less dust.  But when it broke, and I put that litter in a regular box, it would break down into a powdery dust that my kitties would track everywhere.  It also apparently filled the air around me that I didn't see.  I looked online and yep, I found that other people were allergic to it too and complained about its dust.

So it was THE LITTER!  You cannot imagine my surprise and joy when I figured this out.  It was the litter!   All this time it had been the litter and I had suffered because of it.  It's really expensive litter too, and by its name, I was fooled into thinking it was good and wouldn't hurt me, but it did.  It really did.

The other thing I found was that when I switched back to the litter I had used before, Swheat Scoop, my boy kitty then started using the litter box again.  I thought that he would because he had never peed outside with that brand, but when I heard him actually peeing into the box, which I had not heard him do for a while, I was positively elated.  You would never think the sound of kitty pee would sound so good.  He's now been peeing in the box, like a good little boy.  So it turns out:  He Didn't Like the Litter!  Go figure!  I thought it was all these other reasons besides the most obvious and simple one.  He Didn't Like the Litter!  I had noticed that when the kitties peed, the pee mixed with the corn litter gave off a sour unpleasant smell.  I guess he noticed this too and that's why he didn't like peeing in it.

And now I am left to rue how much time and suffering and money I spent on this litter, and on combating my allergies to it and on cleaning up my kitty's aversion to it.  I took allergy medication, I snorted water and salt up my nose, I blew my nose hundreds of times, I dealt with days of terrible congestion, I bought cleaning solution for my kitty's pee stains, and on top of it all, I paid extra money for this really expensive litter my body couldn't stand.

Yeah, it sucks.  But then I think, "Thank God that I figured it out."  Being so allergic for so long has made me really happy to be able to breathe fresh air and not be blowing my nose every minute.  Seriously, it was really bad.

And so I feel lucky, because I figured it out.  It was so simple and yet, I didn't even consider it for the longest time.  But there it was, right in front of my face, and apparently in the air around me.  So it just goes to show, cause and effect is hard to figure out, especially if you don't look hard enough for it.  We are so used to blaming our own immune system or the usual suspects like our body changing or the air outside or what have you, that we don't really stop to think about what might be really causing our symptoms.  If we did, we might actually figure it out sooner and save ourselves a lot of time, suffering, and money.