Improvised high tech cat toys

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Our resident kitty cat Dusty loves chasing the red dot of a laser pointer, just goes apescat over it. There are some odd rules in the game; she only chases it on the floor. If you shine it on a wall or any thing else like a person she won’t pounce and often loses interest. She’ll get agitated if it’s on the ceiling because she can’t get to it. I actually got her a purpose made laser cat toy at Petsmart. It includes a lens that projects a picture of a mouse but that doesn’t seem to stimulate her enough, she prefers the red dot. She gets so worked up about chasing the dot that if I pick up the pointer and the attached keychain rattles she will come running to play laser tag. Yesterday I bought one of those ultrasonic measuring tools that has a laser to help you aim it. Now she associates the ticking sonar noise it makes with the laser to the point that if I make it click only once she will come running upstairs to play.

What other improvised cat toys have you made?

2

Catfishing ued to be a popular activity in our house. Get one of those $10 kid’s fishing rods, and replace the hook part with a fur mouse. Cast it wherever you can, jiggle the mouse, and reel in the cat(s).

3

I sneer at your low-tech laser-pointer.

Back in the '90s, I had the ultimate cat toy:

One $2000 PC
One $300 video card with NTSC out.
One $1600 LCD projector.
One $10 mouse.

Nothing beats interfacing with your kitties through a computer. They’d go batshit chasing the mouse pointer. I guess it wouldn’t have been much fun with your kitty, but both of mine climbed all over each other to take flying leaps at the wall.

4

lunge whips
And free stuffed animals from stores/restaraunts like buy enough of our crap and we’ll give you this cute holiday themed toy or buy a hamburger and we’ll give you a cheap crappy toy.
twist ties
reflected sunlight. but my kitty likes it on the walls and ceiling, but not the floor

5

Our smallest cat loves the laser pointer. (Our oldest is too jaded – she looksd at the spot, looks at your hand, says “You’re doing that!” in cat, and goes back to sleep.) All the cats love playing with dripping water. So I;ve tried things like those cylinders filled with heavy oil that drip through holes, or making fountains, figuring they’d be interested. They’re not. My attempts at high-tech cat toys aren’t as successful as simply letting the faucet drip a little.

6

Garden stake or wooden dowel
4’ piece of twine
Cork from a fine Bordeaux, or cheap swill, your choice. Kitty won’t care.

Carve a little channel into the cork - both around the middle and then on both ends. Carve a little channel in the end of the dowel, or screw an eye hook in. Tie twine through cork channels. Leave a little tail. Tie other end to dowel.

Swing, fling, twirl the cork. Watch kitty go 'round and 'round. Stand in yard or large room and swing in a big arc around you. Watch kitty chase, leap, pounce, and soon flop down, pink tongue hanging out, exhausted. (This is a good game when you have a kitten who needs to be made tired before bed, so he doesn’t wake you up at 3 AM.)

7

Mine all go dingbat over the laser pointer, and I love the puzzled kitty expressions when I turn it off! However, think the all time favorite toy is the ring off the milk jug.

8

We get enthusiastic response from our cats with this low-tech toy. They will even play with it themselves by sitting on one end so that the other end flips up and can be pounced on. Callie and Sandy even learned to pick it up in their mouths and bring it over and drop it on my feet to encourage me to play with them. The big fuzzy craft type of pipe cleaners, rolled up balls of cigarette pack foil, and the reflections from the sun crstal hanging in the window when you give it a little twist to make it spin are also favourites.

9

I’ve a $500 contractor grade laser level. It can be seen in daylight, it can rotate around, or project a fixed line however long you want. It can pulse, stay static or blink.

The fuzzy monsters go into spasms.

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How about very low-tech toys made by a very high-tech machine?

I used to operate an injection molding machine, making various objects that were used on seismic cables. Among these objects were different kinds of plugs that were spaced every so often along the cable, to which would be attached other equipment. In a way, it was like plugging in a lamp or a toaster, although the plugs and the connectors were quite different.

One of the plugs I had to mold (we called this kind a “drop”) bore a remarkable resemblance to a mouse–a small thin part where the wire went in, widening to a round cylindrical shape about an inch in diameter. A mandrel attached to the connectors in the mold, and kept the plastic from shooting out the end of the mold. It also had a pin that reached through the length of the mandrel, which held the connectors in place while the plastic flowed. Typically, a drop would be maybe two to two-and-a-half inches long.

Anyway, when I set the machine up to shoot drops, I always made a test shot or two, just to make sure the mold was positioned correctly and the plastic was flowing as it should be. These test shots had no connectors in them, but I did use scrap wire and a mandrel, just to keep the liquid plastic from flowing out and on the floor. Some would always escape though, through the pin hole in the mandrel, and these test shots would have a three-inch “tail” of plastic that had flowed into and through the pin hole.

So once I trimmed the sprues off the finished test shot, we were left with something mouse-shaped, with a long tail. Rather than just throwing the test shots out, I’d bring them home, for our cats to play with. They loved them, especially on the kitchen floor, where they would make a satisfying “clunk” as they rolled.

This isn’t a terribly clear explanation of the injection molding process nor of the drops themselves, but the important thing is that our cats liked their “drop mice,” as we came to call them. Drops are practically indestructible, and our cats, who are very good at destroying toys, can still play with their drop mice, and probably will for years.

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spoons – you used to do injection molding? The company I just ledft (well, it left me, and everyone else who worked there…) did precision injection molding. Some extremely interesting blobs showed up on the platen when they were starting up, and I brought some home as curios. Nothing small enough that our cats would want to play with, though.

12

I made a “Fledermaus” once…by tying one of those small toy mice to a Mylar balloon by its ribbon. By adding just the right amount of weight, the balloon would float around the house, much like a blimp, and the cats would go wild. They couldn’t reach the balloon, but they could easily grap the mouse.

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In a weird way, the random blobs were almost more interesting than what could be made with the precision molds. I used to get some great blobs (though we called them “glops” in our shop), especially when purging and/or running one color out by “chasing” it with another. I saved a few of them, just for fun–depending on the shape they took, I ended up using them for such things as key hooks and coasters for cold drinks.

Sorry for the aside, folks–back to the discussion of cat toys.

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Improvised cat toys in order of simplicity Vs stupidity:-

The “Ping-Pong ball in bath tub”

  • Place Ping-Pong ball in bath tub, add cat
    (Drawback – need to replace ball in tub periodically)
    The “Pat-o-Feeder”
  • Take nearly empty dried cat-food box, place on smooth floor, watch cat pat it round for hours, occasionally being rewarded with a tasty treat.
    (Drawback – sound of cat patting a cardboard box around a floor for hours)
    The “steeplechase” (or “really dumb idea, don’t try this at home”)
  • Attach one end of piece of string to blade of ceiling fan, tie weight to other end (newspaper was chosen as the kitty could tear it and create a mess everywhere) adjust length of string and weight and until it’s just bouncing nicely off the furniture as it whirls round in circle, say “hey, watch this” to friends, add cat
    (Drawbacks – carnage, property damage etc, – vague feelings of guilt when seeing a certain widely distributed “viral advert” featuring a cat being sucked into a ceiling fan in a remarkably similar scenario – though in fact all that got hurt were the cat’s feelings at having a group of adult humans pissing themselves laughing as she tore round and round a small room, up and down over furniture, skidding and leaping after a scrap of paper)
15

Both our cats like the laser pointer and small fur mice toys.

One cat (the female) LOVES socks. We took a few, old single socks and stuffed them with other socks, and tied them shut. While both cats play with the stuffed socks (the ones made with old infant socks are about the size of fur mice), one cat will play with any sock. She frequently spends nights dragging socks upstairs from the basket of clean socks in the laundry room.

We also discovered another favorite “toy” for her. My daughter took one of the fur mice and put it under a clear plastic shoe box. The cat went crazy trying to figure out how to get the mouse out. (The male cat figured it out in seconds. He just moved the box until the mouse’s tail was sticking out, grabbed the tail with his teeth, and yanked.)

The other cat’s favorite toys are an old set of plastic jacks that my mother gave my daughter many years ago. They bounce well, and are easy to carry in his mouth. Unfortunately, we keep losing them under furniture or somewhere, and he doesn’t like the ones they sell now.

Another favorite “toy” for the male cat is the kitty water bubbler I bought the first time we left them home for a weekend. The bottle of water fits into the bowl beneath it, and when you fill the bottle and set it up, water squirts into the bowl in a steady stream. Even more amusing are the bubbles that make noise and rise to the top of the water. However, I made the mistake of showing him how to make it bubble by tapping on the bottle part. We had to stop using it when I came home one day after filling the bottle, to find the bottle on its side next to the bowl, and the bathroom floor covered in water. (A full bottle will NOT fall over all by itself.)

The other night, the female found a string of Mardi Gras-type beads that my son had been playing with. She started chasing and batting it around, so the male came to see what was so interesting. He picked one end up in his mouth and tried to walk away with it. The female simply chased after him trying to catch the other end.

16

Blowing a marble along a few hundred feet of coiled semirigid plastic piping was a big hit.

But the Jacob’s Ladder was not.

And the time I ran through the house with the gas powered backpack leaf blower, they puffed up for days. Actually, Mrs. Napier puffed up a little, too, that time.

17

Ditto on the laser pointers. My cats–actually they were my mom’s cats–used to chase the red dot no matter where it went. Up the drapes or on a high shelf.

The little clear plastic cap that comes off the chocolate syrup bottle. One of our cats used to play “fetch” with it. All we had to do was tap our fingernails on it, and he’d come running. He wouldn’t play fetch with any other “lid,” as he called it.

The really thick ponytail holders without the little metal thing on them. The male would grip in with his front teeth, flip his head back, and hurl those things several feet from where he stood.

The best one to watch was the suspended balloon. Get a helium balloon with a really long string tied to it so that when the balloon is on the ceiling, the string hangs down just above your cat’s standing-on-all-fours height. As your air-conditioning (or a fan) blows and wobbles the balloon ever so slightly, the string sort of dances about, tantalizing the object cat. This has provided entertainment to every cat I’ve ever known.

18

I forgot to mention that the “string” is actually the thin ribbon that people usually curl with scissors when using it to wrap gifts.

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BTW, as I mentioned above, always try to get a Mylar balloon; those old fashioned rubber ones always lose their bouyancy after a day or two, while the Mylar one will keep floating for weeks provided you don’t bat it.