the gf’s cat, Elvis, loves the twisty things that come off when you open a gallon of milk. there are a dozen of them wraped around pieces of furniture in the house. his favorite toy is a dinosaur that he carries around the house when he’s sad. it makes the crinkley sound like tissue paper, which he also loves.
Boxes.
Hamish’s first law of boxes: Boxes contain cats.
My wife had this makeup brush, very puffy. The cats loved it. The cats would open drawers to get it.
Our kitties like to jump up high and flick the light switch.
They also love anything with feathers on it, including my red satin g-string with marabou trim - our roommate Nicholas found it on the livingroom floor one evening. We figure Spike probably dragged it out of our bedroom while we were at work, played with it, then got bored.
One of my two kittens likes to pull down towels if they’re hung anywhere under five feet high, and paw-stomp them into submission.
They both stalk the hedgehog, who ignores them.
i don’t actually have a cat but my friend does and his cat also loves ice cubes and laser pointers. His cat will literally sit there for hours, sometimes a couple days, and once for over a week (except when it was busy burying poop or eating…) sitting at the base of the wall and staring at it, waiting for the dot to come back on the wall after you turn it off.
My cat Opie loves my socks. He’ll jump up to the shelf above where I keep them, and then reach down with one paw like he’s fishing and grab them off the shelf. The one pair of wool socks I own are his favorite, but it’s not at all uncommon to come home and see three or four pair of normal white socks on the floor throughout my apartment.
I’m not sure if cats can be trained to fetch, but my other cat Lily is just a natural fetcher. I can throw her little mouse down the hallway and she’ll run and bring it back to me until one of us (usually me) tires of the game.
As I sit here typing, my cat Henry is trying to catch the mouse cursor.
My parents have two bengals (I’m assuming Nikita is one, since she looks just like Bilbo), and one of them, Bilbo, is also quite fond of pushing things around with his paws. His favourite game used to be bashing tins of food off the counter, until we finally learned to put groceries away immediately. I believe that decision came shortly after one can came a little too close to landing on his brother’s head. Come to think of it, Bilbo also has the obsession with long skinny things and has brought home too many garter snakes to count, though they’ve all survived because he loses interest once they stop moving.
Both of the cats like to play in sand. They aren’t interested in using it as bathroom facilities, they just like to dig and roll around and just generally go nuts in sand - it’s really quite amusing to watch.
I’m sure I’ll think of a ton more as soon as I hit submit, but one last one isn’t so much a strange toy as a strange ritual with toys. Bilbo loves the toy mice that are made from real fur. Nothing unusual there, but you can pretty much set your watch by the sequence of events every time he gets a new one. First, he’ll bat it around a couple of times, then about 5-10 seconds in, he’ll eat the tail off of it. This is followed by a bit more general play with the mouse, but then he decides that it needs a bath, so he goes and deposits it in his water dish. At this point, sometimes he decides to have a drink with the mouse still floating in the dish, sometimes he fishes the mouse out himself, and other times he sits there looking pathetic until someone rescues the mouse for him. Even after he’s had mice for a while, they’ll occasionally get a bath, but the worst is when he manages to get the mouse out of the water when there’s no one around and then throws it into the food dish, so you wind up with a mouse that’s covered in crusted-on bits of dry cat food.
I adopted “Puppy-Cat,” a lilac Siamese that had been raised in a house of dogs. Back then I was a smoker, and whenever I threw an empty cigarette pack towards the garbage, Puppy-Cat would retrieve it and bring in back in his mouth so I could throw it again. Cat was a retriever.
One of ours has recently become obsessed with rides in a laundry basket. If the empty basked is sitting on the floor, she jumps in and watches my husband (the laundry basket pilot) expectantly. He will then lift the basket up to chest level, or even above his head, and carry it around the house, upstairs, downstairs, etc. Kitty will purr with delight.
At least one of my cats collects foam eagplugs. I’m always finding piles of them under the bed when I vaccuum. Both cats also love those little molded plastic things that pills come in; since I’ve had a cold this past week, both cats come up to me eagerly every time they hear me ripping open one of the Nyquil packets, and I’ve taken to tossing the empty casing to them once I’ve taken my pills to let them have their fun with it.
Austen’s specially beloved toy is a little crocheted circlet, kind of like a doll’s cap, with long drawstrings hanging off one side. She sleeps with it under one paw, carries it around the house in her mouth while making deep throaty sounds and sets it down to yowl over, and places it on the bed where I’ve been sleeping after I get up in the mornings. I don’t know what significance it holds for her, but it seems to be a pretty important object in her life.
Lucia takes very little interest in the usual cat toys, but sometimes plays with objects so tiny that I’m not certain what it is she’s pouncing on and pawing at. It usually turns out to be a speck of dryer fluff. She also likes foam packing “peanuts,” and I have to take them away from her before she chews them up.
Recently, I got take-out food at Claim Jumper. They give you these little root beer barrel hard candies. I just grabbed the candies out of the bag and put them on the dining rule table and forgot about them.
Stormy discovered them. She bats them around all over the house. I’m finding them all over the place. If I recall correctly, she did the same thing with Hershey’s kisses.
She certainly is! My sister bought her in lieu of going on a class trip to Washington, and Nikita instantly fell in love with me. Five years later, when I finally moved into an apartment that allowed cats, I brought her with me.
Heh. Drinking straws. I’d forgotten about that. See, my girlfriend at the time was spending the night (mild TMI warning, so I’ll use a spoiler.)…
[spoiler]…and we were in the throes of passionate lovemaking, oral style. In comes Nikita with a straw in her mouth. She leapt onto the bed, walked over my girlfriend’s nekkidness, and started puff, puffing through the straw into her ear. :eek:
I just lost it… it was too hilarious. Unfortunately, my girlfriend didn’t, and it completely killed her mood. She dumped me about two months later… and to this day I wonder if the cat had something to do with it.
[/spoiler]
Check. The waxier the better. At least she’s not like my parents’ cat, who liked to lick my ear canal when he was a kitten.
I think the easier question is What strange things don’t your cats play with?
Mine have played with just about anything you can think of: pens, coins, toilet paper tubes, empty water bottles, shower curtains, paper clips, paper or plastic bags, plastic clothes hangers, those little personal metal shopping carts, paper towels (shredding them), pot holders, cork coasters, sheets (but only the jersey material), blankets (but only that vellum stuff - and actually that was more eating than playing). I love cats 
My cat Gus loves this square of wool that I knitted and felted. It was supposed to turn into a wonton-shaped, catnip-filled cat toy for him, but no. He stole it out of the bathroom where it was drying and carried it around the house for two hours, growling at it and running from anyone who tried to take it away from him. He’s not interested in it when it’s dry, but when it’s wet, he turns into a Fierce Jungle Cat.
You have a hedgehog? That is so cool!
How’d you get him/her? I heard they could be housetrained, is it any trouble to keep?
I’d love a hedgehog…
Beer bottle caps. They love them. I stopped even trying to thrown them away because the cats would just dig them out of the trash. Eventually they end up underneath something so I just have to be certain that I don’t have anyone help me move my couch or other furniture because that’s where all the beer bottle caps will be and I don’t want to have to explain it.
They also enjoy used q-tips, the plastic thingy off the water jugs, emery boards, pens, those thingys that cover the bolts on the toilet and many more.
My ex-boyfriends testicles.
Actually it was only a one time thing but just about the funniest damn thing I have ever seen. One night we were ahem “stretching” 
with him on top (you know…so he could stretch my legs) and unbeknownst to either of us my demon cat jumped on the bed. She saw his testicles swinging and decided to give them a good whack. After he collapsed on me in tears, it took me a minute to roll him off and get enough of a breath to howl with laughter.
There is nothing funnier than seeing a grown man cry after having his nuts tagged by the cat.