Well, I found the ultimate cat toy. Good enough that I didn’t get my 6:00 a.m. wake-up-and-feed-me-now meow. The ultimate cat distractor is…
…another cat.
I’m cat sitting for some friends’ cat, Sleepy (love the name, although it seems to be a misnomer), but they live >20 minutes from my place, and I decided it was just too much trouble to go back and forth every day. So I brought Sleepy home last night. My 2 guys greeted me at the door as usual when I got home and didn’t think much of the box I was carrying until it started making noise. Boy, the look on their faces was priceless. And then some fur (I don’t know if it was a nose or a paw) poked against one of the holes. They really went crazy at that! After some adjustment, smell-each-other-through-the-door time, I let Sleepy out. As I expected, Teddy (my older but very playful male) thought it was great and Lily (the ~1 year old female) hated the whole thing. Teddy and Sleepy are having a blast together playing and chasing each other around. Lily’s sitting under the dining room table hissing. Ah, cats!
Yup. My 8month old Rio thinks 5.5YO Molly is the ultimate cat toy. Punkin’ is big enough to knock the stuffing out of him, and Trouble’s old and cranky enough they’re ALL scared of him, but Molly…well, it’s just like a little brother/older sister relationship, if you know what I mean.
We have a friend and his dogs staying with us and our 6 cats for the holidays. The dog is terrified of cats. The cats have a healthy fear of the dog. Except for my 4 year old Gaia who is Queen of all Things. She refused to run from the big, excitable thing. She kept her post on the couch, dozed off and hissed whenever the dog came with in paw distance. In her sleep. It was actually kind of funny.
Our cat Petra let us know in no uncertain terms that Loki was the best kitty toy we could have given her. Since we brought Loki home in July they’ve played together constantly.
HA HA I was just entertaining a cat with a green laser pointer this morning!
Anyway, the ultimate cat toy would be a harrier jump jet with modified controls. If I were a cat I’d love it!
Teddy doesn’t get the laser pointer thing. He keeps looking at the actual pointer I’m holding in my hand instead of at the dot on the floor. Lily will chase it, but she has an attention span of about 30 seconds. I too thought that was going to be their favorite toy, but in my case, a kitten seems to be a better toy for them.
Dusty goes nuts over the laser pointer. She actually gets excited when she hears me pick it up. She must have identified the sound the key chain or the button makes. I got a poingter that is specifically made to be a cat toy with a lens tha projects a picture of a mouse but she ignored it in favor of the plain dot which she loves to chase.
I see a lot of cat-related threads around here, but not a lot of dog threads. Do dopers have a preference for cats? I mean cats *are *better and we are a smart lot so it’s hardly surprising that we’d all have cats. But I’m curious about pet preferences. Although I suppose this is really a IMHO-type question. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start a poll over there about it. Unless anyone knows of one that’s already been done…?
I have to agree that another cat is the best cat toy.
Our eldest girl, Sebastian, used to be all over us for constant attention. Since she wouldn’t sit still at night, we ended up keeping her out of the bedroom while we slept (my husband is very easily disturbed by small noises at night and needs his sleep or he’s a bear in the morning). All night long we heard her howl and yowl as if her heart was breaking. She’d wait outside the door for us all night and come charging into the bedroom to greet us in the morning. If we were too busy, she would sulk in the corner.
So, for my birthday, cat lover that I am, I said I wanted a new kitten, someone to play with our little Sebastian. Off we went to the shelter, picked out our sweet (and desperately in need of extra love and attention, scrawny little beat up thing that she was) new kitten, Kero. We had to keep them seperated for about a week after bringing her home, since Sebastian was very insulted we’d bring a new kitty into her home. We slowly let them get used to each other’s scents, exchanging their bedding with each others’ on a regular basis, letting them stick their paws out at each other under the doors.
Of course, today they are inseperable. They clean each other, play with each other, sleep with each other. Oh yes, and the best part - Sebastian doesn’t yowl or cry anymore in the middle of the night.
