Yes…the cats ARE in charge and don’t ever forget it. I stopped buying my cats toys ages ago because they’d rather play with the milk caps than the toys I bought them. The ONE time I bought them a toy (it was a long plastic stick with a big feather and a bell on the end of it) they were more interested in the STICK part than the actual part they were supposed to play with.
But I love them all the same. Why else would I worry to death and turn MY life upside down to try and rehabilitate my two who are re-learning to live together?
IDBB
Uzi, my father made something similiar. Being a pack rat/Mr Fix It, he had scrap lumber and carpet remains in the garage.
He made a three foot long and foot high rectangular box open at both ends. On the top are three platforms like this _ - _ on poles. Every surface is covered with carpet reminants.
The cat loves it. She can climb/hide/scratch in one easy place. It’s right by the window so she can sun herself and keep an eye on the squirrels - there’s nothing funnier than seeing a squirrel come up to the window and taunt the cat.
Bags are great! Paper bags with handles can be hilarious! My cat decided to explore the paper bag, and then put his head through the handle, and when he realized the handle was around his neck, took off running. The loud noise coming from behind him scared him even more, and freaked out my other cat. Needless to say, he couldn’t get away from the loud scary thing that was chasing him. After a few minutes I could actually catch him to release him from his self induced torment.
BonoVox–this has happened to us on ocassion too and it’s the funniest thing in the world to watch my 18 lb cat tear through the house with this thing attached to her.
It usually takes a few moments for the laughter to subside before I go catch her wobbly ass and take it off of her.
I’ve also watched the Evil Bags From Hell torment kitties, and it is hilarious.
One of the best toys I’d ever found was a little rabbit fur ball with a bell on the end of a flexible wire attached to a suction cup. Stuck that on the front of the dishwasher, and the kitties beat the dickens out of it.
Favorite crazy kitty story: Kitty Rag is a small female, and grabs a cicada which has stunned itself by running into the patio door. She brings it inside, and it buzzes while she’s holding it in her mouth, causing her to spit it out. Boots, the older tomcat, joins the operation and they proceed to play kitchen bug hockey with the spit covered cicada. Kitty Rag knocks the bug under the range, and Boots looks at her for a moment before cuffing her on the side of the head.
The caption would have read: “That was a good toy. Why knock it under the range, idiot?”
He then lay down and stuck a paw under the range, searching for the beetleybug.
I had to intervene with Mr. Yardstick so play could be resumed.
This happens quite frequently with junebugs and whatnot that manage to get into the house with our two, dances. Thank god for Mr.Yardstick or Buttercup would have no bugs to kill and present to us puny humans who seem incapable of killing them ourselves.
What in the hell is it with milk rings? My cats LOVE those. They bring hours of fun. I wish human children were that easy to please.
Don’t fear, celestina. Sometimes cats DO play with real toys, but they do it secretively, when you aren’t watching. I bought this toy for my cats once and they wouldn’t even look in its direction. I soon forgot all about it. But wouldn’t you know it, one day I walk into my bedroom and the toy is sitting in the middle of the floor. One of the cats had brought it in there to play with. Now occassionally I see them batting around with it. So maybe your cat just needs time.
My sister’s cat loves toys. She carries them all over the place like they’re her babies. So not all cats are weird.
Oh, man, this is my Emmy’s favorite toy EVER (*besides the catnip cigars - those are like Stoner Kitty toys…). She will refuse to go to sleep at night unless I take the feather toy and play with her for ten minutes - if she’s on the floor, all I do is drag it up the bed and she goes ballistic, hurling her entire body on it.
*The catnip cigars are the strongest catnip toys I have ever seen. I had to order them from the internet this time because I can’t seem to find them in Va - in NYC, I bought them from a pet store in the West Village - and my mom called me at work because the box was on the stairs, and Emmy was literally trying to rip it open with her claws. So I told my mom to go ahead and give it to her. She then called half an hour later to say that Emmy had gone crazy over the toy for about twenty minutes and was now laying on the floor with the cigar under her head, drooling. I had to point out that she was seriously stoned and would be that way for another hour or so.
We bought a commercial mop bucket (like the janitors use) and it came in a big box with a hole in each side. Great kitty house. My son colored the outside like a real house for them.
Other necessities: the laser pointer (best $5 I ever spent!) the milk rings, tin foil balls and shopping bags with handles. Yep, they’ve all been mentioned. Cats love all that stuff. Also ping-pong balls.
I did find some actual store-bought cat toys that mine like. They’re little stuffed-animal things with catnip in them and something else, like waxed paper that makes them crinkle. They love them.
And the little balls, like a small cage with a bell inside, usually sold in 3-packs. We call them jingle balls. My one cat will play Fetch with them. We can throw it down the basement steps and he’ll go get it and carry it back up in his mouth.
The only problem I’ve found with the catnip filled toys is that I have to keep getting new ones because the cats will actually shred them to nothing in order to get at the catnip.
My sister got some catnip toys from a craft fair a few years ago, handmade little stuffed heart things. My cats still go nuts over them. They must be incredibly strong.
They do the same thing. They’ll roll all over them and drool and their eyes will get all glazed and roll back in their heads… and then they’ll just lay there on the heart thing for awhile. They have that, “Hey man, it’s all good” look on their furry little face.
A coworker gave me a plastic dish of dried catnip and my cats (plus my sister’s) plunged their little faces in the dish as soon as I set it down on the floor. They ate it all up! I didn’t know they would eat it–I just thought they would sniff it and then move on once the odor was gone. I remembering being scared they would get sick.
Oh, man, that’s my absolute favorite look! LOL - to be honest, there were times in NYC when I was still living with my roomie/best friend where he and I would be a bit stoned and laying on a bed watching a movie, and the cats would be laying on the bed with us after enjoying some time with their cigars and all FOUR of us would have that look on our faces. If only we’d take pictures…:D.
Oooh, yeah, forgot about those. We’ve found that practice golf balls are a huge hit. (If you’ve never seen one, it’s basically a wiffle golf ball, with lots o’ little holes in it for kitty claws.)
They’re such a wonderful thing because the cat gets the same play out of 'em as the jingle balls, without all the noise, at three and four in the morning. Plus, they’re damn near indestructable.
Mmm hmmm, I’ve spent oodles of cash on toys and my two monsters will give them an occassional swat. Now a piece of tape, well that’s hours of fun. Tissue paper from a box? They practically cry when I take the shredded remnants away.
But their favorite toy of all time was the box of packing peanuts. I didn’t mean for them to play with it, I just went into the other room for a couple of minutes. Seriously, scientists should come to study the physics loophole they created-- a rather small box of packing peanuts was spread all over my living room in seconds, and in foot high drifts. It’s been months and I’m still finding the bedamned things. Still, the kitties are so cute.
One word of caution-never let a cat have a piece of string unattended-they can choke on it. At the very least, they’ll eat it and you end up with Poop-On-A-Rope.
My cats love paper balls and this wand thing we bought for them that has a string hanging from it. Buffy especially. She’ll sit in front of the china closet and cry until we take it out of the drawer, and she’ll jump at the drawer to get it.
As for catnip, we’ve found that getting a scratching post and rubbing catnip on it works well.
And being nearly indestructable, they don’t shatter into sharp pieces when one steps on them in the dark. These practice balls are lightweight enough to skitter across the floor entrancingly, too. Milk jug rings have the same property.
there are things called purr pads that will help keep furniture free of cat hair, and my mom’s cats seem to like them pretty good.
more toys:
ferrets (preferably alive)
an empty pack of smokes crushed into a ball. i think they are attracted to the smell of tobacco.
wish they would eat cockroaches.
dead leaves from the house plants.
those toy matchbox sized cars that you pull back and release and they race across the floor.
i also highly recommend the laser.
Strangely enough, another toy my cats seem to love is clothespins.
Not the ones with the metal hinge, they only really like the barrel type wooden ones. They bat them around and chew on them like crazy. The best toys those cats have seem to be the toys they invented themselves.
Ah yes…poop-on-a-rope. When Rumpleteazer was little, she figured out how to get the top of our garbage can open and would dig through there just to get to the ringystring things that come around a slice of bologna. She would eat the bedamned things and we wouldn’t know it till later when I went to go clean out the box and there it would be…poop-on-a-rope.
