A veterinarian, his wife and a garage next to the practice.

Dr. Elsey’s is the brand of Precious Cat Inc., a company that Dr. Bruce Elsey, a veterinarian who treats only cats, and his wife Kathy Elsey founded in 1987, according to the company and to a 2018 release from Cheyenne LEADS, the economic-development body for Cheyenne and Laramie County in Wyoming. The company’s own timeline begins earlier, in 1978, when it says Dr. Elsey opened the All Cat Clinic, a feline-only practice in the Denver metro area.

The litter grew out of that practice. The company says that in 1985 Dr. Elsey drove to a local mine to collect clay fines and began testing them, and that after Precious Cat was set up in 1987 he packed clumping clay into gallon milk containers in a garage next to his clinic and sold it to the clinic’s clients. The first named product, it says, was Classic.

Dr. Elsey told much the same story in a February 2012 interview with the cat blog Floppycats, though with slightly different dates. There he placed the start in “88-89,” said he had grown up in Garden City, Kansas, where he knew of a stickier clay that would hold together, and described packaging it in gallon containers in his garage to see how his clients liked it. He also said he had been a veterinarian for about eleven years before starting Precious Cat. The company’s published timeline gives 1987, and we give both.

In that interview the products were still called Precious Cat litters. By 2018 the Cheyenne LEADS release referred to “Dr. Elsey’s Precious Cat Products,” and by 2021 the company presented itself simply as Dr. Elsey’s, the name on its website today.

Clay, a training litter and, later, cat food.

The range is built around clumping clay. In the 2012 interview Dr. Elsey said the first product was a clumping clay litter, that the company had also made a pine litter it later dropped, and that it sold a silica gel litter. The Cheyenne LEADS release of 2018 described the clay itself as Wyoming bentonite, and the company now describes its clay as silver sodium bentonite.

The product Dr. Elsey singled out in 2012 was Cat Attract, which the company describes as a behaviour-modification and training litter. He called it his favourite because, in his practice, he had seen owners give up cats over litter-box behaviour, and he described addressing that as personally rewarding. The company says it began testing Cat Attract in 1999 at the All Cat Clinic and at two Colorado rescue groups, the Animal Rescue and Adoption Society in Denver and the Cat Care Society of Colorado.

Other names followed. Today the company lists litters including Ultra, Classic, Kitten Attract and Clean Tracks. In 2017, it says, it launched a new packaging design and its first food line, cleanprotein, a high-protein kibble later joined by canned food, and introduced a cartoon “resident academic scholar” called Professor Cat. It says it launched nationally in select major retailers in 2018, added cleanprotein treats in 2024 and, the same year, stopped making any scented litter.

The company frames this around a phrase it repeats on its website: “pets, not profit.” It says it supplies shelter kits and free litter to shelters and rescue groups, and in a 2021 release Dr. Elsey put it this way: “We try to speak for the cat.”

Cat litter, and who makes it.

The seven brands in this group are all cat-litter names: World’s Best Cat Litter, Tidy Cats, Fresh Step, Cat’s Best, Catit, PrettyLitter and Dr. Elsey’s. Cat-litter brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from names that still carry a founder’s story to labels that now belong to much larger consumer-goods or pet-care groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a pet shop or an online subscription.

A litter brand’s identity is usually carried less by the product itself than by a bag or box, a name and the material it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its litter is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its litter is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Englewood to the rail line at Cheyenne.

For most of its history the company worked from Colorado. It says that in 1997 Dr. Elsey bought a warehouse building and installed automated packaging equipment, and that in 2010 the facility was expanded to receive litter by rail. Releases from 2018 and 2021 place that earlier operation in Englewood, Colorado.

On 8 August 2018 Cheyenne LEADS announced that Precious Cat would move its manufacturing and distribution to Swan Ranch Business Park in Cheyenne, Wyoming, citing the need for rail service and more space than it had in Englewood. Dr. Bruce Elsey, named as the company’s president, said it had chosen Cheyenne for its rail and rail-served land and for the work ethic and values of a town that size, and that the availability of bentonite was also a factor: “There is nothing better than Wyoming bentonite.” The release named Aaron Westcott as chief executive and said the company planned a 150,000-square-foot building on 33 acres. The Associated Press reported the plan the next day, with a target of 2019.

The company’s timeline dates the move of manufacturing to 2020. In February 2021 Pet Insight and Cheyenne LEADS published the company’s announcement that the Swan Ranch facility was complete, closer to the source of its clay and to the railroad it uses to ship products. The same release described Dr. Elsey’s as “a veterinarian-owned cat product brand,” and the company still describes Dr. Elsey and Kathy Elsey as its founders.

For a design guide, Dr. Elsey’s shows how a founder’s title and surname can carry a brand that grew from a single practice to a production line on a Wyoming railway. Compare World’s Best Cat Litter, another American litter brand built around its main material, and PrettyLitter, a newer name in the same aisle. For this guide we use navy, a clay silver and a warm clay brown with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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