The type of plastic that I think may have been used to wrap up a small package. What on earth would motivate him to swallow such a thing?
I have read somewhere that certain plastics are made using (among other things) a certain organic (ie animal derived) ingredient that may retain part of its smell, making them attractive to cats.
Or perhaps that specific piece had been used to wrap food.
Please, please take your cat to the vet in case there is still some plastic in its system. It could be quite dangerous!
Some breeds like to consume string like material … particularly Siamese. Your vet might not be able to do much because some plastics don’t show up on x-ray or ultrasound … like the “Hartz” cat ball my Alaskan Malamute swallowed many years ago. Finally he just had surgery …
How’s the doofus doing? What did your vet say?
The Daughter’s family has an idiot cat who eats plastic. All plastic bags in the house have chew marks.
We recycle at The Daughter’s house. White trash bags are tied to chairs next to the kitchen. Her new targets are the bottom of those bags! Oh fun when the bottom of the bag gives way and we hear the clunk-rattle-bang of containers hitting the floor and rolling across the kitchen.
Her plastic consumption causes regular puking of the plastic. Yet another mess on the floor to be cleaned up!
@Fiddle_Peghead, watch your cat for really odd behavior. Inability to keep food or water down, constant retching, no poops in the litter box. These actions may signal an obstruction, and that means a veterinary emergency.
For now, I doubt the vet would be able to do much except feel around the belly and listen for normal bowel sounds. An x-ray wouldn’t show anything.
Keep all trash in a covered trash can!
~VOW
How do you think he’s doing? He’s down there on the floor with his furry white belly pointing up at me because he thinks I’ll just drop what I’m doing and…um…hold on…okay, I’m back.
The vet said to do as suggested. Just keep an eye on him. He’s now exploring the kitchen countertop, which is rather high, but I inadvertently left a bar stool beside it, and he’s just discovered all the wonders up there.
I once had a cat who cracked open a cassette tape and ate the tape. I had to keep cutting the tape off as it came out. Should have taken him to a vet.
Or you could have just grabbed a pencil. 
My cat unfortunately loves to eat plastic string. Once she ate a length of fishing line, and another time she ate a bunch of plastic “Easter grass”. Both were serious events. She eventually passed both of them–the first by pooping it out and the second by puking–but she was close to needing surgery, and had to spend a few days at the vet for monitoring and getting antibiotics (she puked up a lot of blood the second time).
In short, cats are sometimes super dumb and like to eat inedible things. Keep it away from them since it might not be so innocuous next time.
Nibbler, doing well but not particularly happy after the vet shaved off a little cylinder of fur to insert the IV:
Really dumb joke. I just read if you pull a string sticking out of your cat’s anus, you could cause lacerations and all kinds of damage. RETRACTED!
I wonder how long a cat could keep that down. In fact, when I inspected it, there were two plastic strips essentially pressed together. I separated them and they were exactly the same length. I can’t think of what they could be. As I’ve recently moved and have gotten a lot of packages, who knows where he found them and how long they had been there. But a while ago, I noticed that he would dry heave maybe two or three times, but ONLY when I had picked him up and put him on my lap while sitting on my office chair. Being home literally almost all the time since Covid kicked in in March, I’ve never seen him with dry heaves except in that position. Maybe there was something about it that cause them? I see that dry heaves could be an indication that your cat had in fact ingested string.
By the way, if you sew or do embroidery, never leave a threaded needle where your cat can get to it. Cats love string, often eating it. Once the thread is down his throat, the needle goes down, too, often with tragic results.
My brother-in-law’s cat ate some Easter grass and (expensive) emergency surgery ensued.
StG
Upon going in the second time for expensive surgery to remove accumulated string/shoelaces from our cats stomach, we asked if it would be easier to install a zipper.
You may have been joking, but: Never, never, never pull on a piece of string, tape, or whatever protruding from a cat’s (or dog’s) mouth or anus, unless it comes out extremely easily. If there’s even a fractional bit of resistance, stop pulling immediately and call the vet.
The rest of the string/whatever may be wrapped around a piece of stomach or intestine, and pulling on it can cause huge problems.
– a cat who got an end of a piece of string, plastic, or whatever in its mouth, possibly while playing with it or because there was food on it, may wind up swallowing the whole thing if some of it starts down their throat, because they can’t get a good grip on it to get it back out of their mouths.
There was the Christmas we had purple tinsel, because The Daughter insisted.
I was observing a cat, The Son’s black one. He’d take a few steps forward, then turn around and check behind him. After a few more verses of this song played, I looked closer and saw that something indeed was following him, and it came out of his back end.
When I finally caught him and inspected that part of his anatomy, I saw it was a string of purple tinsel, with an “ornament” or two attached.
I grabbed a gob of kleenex and pulled, slowly. It was a full strand of tinsel, with several “ornaments” adorning it. While the cat did not want to be picked up, he was quite relieved when I finally put him down. He walked away, his haughty demeanor restored.
~VOW
Agreed, as I said. And I would just add, don’t even do it if it comes out easily, knowing what I know now.
In my case, I just cut the tape (without pulling) as it gradually came out, with attached pieces of poop.
Do you remember the band? I’m curious about your cat’s taste in music.
Our cat loves licking plastic bags. I suspect he likes the taste of the plasticizers that remain on the surface. Sometimes it gets him excited, and he pees in place. We try to limit his access to the bags, therefore. As far as I know, he never tried eating them.
Another of our cats loved eating vaseline. a little vaseline is good – it minimizes hairballs. They even sell a mixture of vaseline and malt, called petromalt, for precisely this purpose. But Midnight decided she didn’t need the malt flavoring. She’s eat vaseline right out of the jar. If you opened a jar, she’d come right over. A little vaseline for hairballs is one thing, but we tried to keep her from gorging on the stuff.
If I may, let me just ask this one more time, but in a slightly different way: Could Kenny have swallowed the plastic strips a month ago, or perhaps even longer? I keep the apartment pretty clean, and haven’t had any packages or such delivered lately that would have had the strips. And I think I would have seen them on the floor where he could get at them. Therefore, maybe he swallowed them much earlier. I note that he doesn’t dry heave as I mentioned earlier. It’s only been a few days though.