Feces flinging feline. Help!

Hello! I'm brand new to the site. My wife and I are fairly new owners of a 4 month old kitten. Overall, she's a great pet. We've noticed that her litterbox habits are getting sloppy though.

Originally, we laughed when she would sit in her box, do her thing, and meow to us, like she wanted us to know what she was doing. We were proud!

She stopped that after a week, and then we laughed because she would dig for about 3-4 minutes when she was done. The digging has become so intense that she flings litter out of the box. I put a mat there to catch it, and help knock some of the litter off of her paws when she jumps out, but this morning I noticed it was worse. There was litter stuck to the wall near her box!

And worse, it looks like there are chunks of feces in the litter stuck to the wall, and some that gets tracked away from the box! I don't understand what's she's doing!

sidebar: I should also add that when she's digging in her litter box, she'll move the litter around so that 1/3 of the box is now down to the plastic liner. She claws at that quite a bit too. We thought that maybe the litter wasn't thick enough in there, but I added a thicker layer, and she still does it.

She has a covered litterbox, and I just added the plastic door on when her incessant flinging of litter out of the box was getting too messy. Now with the addition of the chunks in the litter now, it's just nasty! I've even seen this tracked as far as to ON the couch, and she's not even allowed on there. The door stays open about an inch though, and that's apparently enogh to let the flying poo through.

What can I do to keep her litterbox habits neater, and keep her from tracking her feces away from the box?

I've never had a problem with feces, but before I got the covered box, it seemed like my cats would fling the litter as if they were in a pile of money! The floor in their room would be a solid layer of litter by 3 days after I last vacuumed. I haven't had the covered box long enough to know what kind of difference it will make. Have you tried switching litter brands? Some brands stick to feet more than others. It's a thought.

The litter brand is something I forgot to mention. We have the clumping kind, and we *did* change brands. The tracking and "feces flinging" didn't start as soon as we changed, but has happened after the change.

It's hard to know if it was related to that, since as a kitten, she's doing something new or different everyday.

Litter doesn't really matter all that much in this case. I am sure she will try to fling anything you use at this point. One thing you can try is buy one of those large rubbermaid containers or something similar and put the lid on it. Cut a hole in the LID so she enters from the top. That way the sides are covered so very little if any will fling out.

There is also a litterbox at PetSmart that has all the sides covered and the cat enters through a ramp along the side. I can imagine they are very expensive though.