Why do cats love playing with balls of aluminium foil?
Well, as to aluminum foil in general, cats don’t necessarily love the stuff at all. One suggested way to train cats not to walk on things like kitchen tables is to cover them with aluminum foil for awhile, as some cats have an aversion to walking on the crinkly stuff. As with many such things, probably works for some, not all.
As for balls of aluminum foil - cats hone their predatory skills via play behaviors that mimic them. Batting around small moving objects is one of those. Aluminum balls are lightweight and skitter convincingly. Very attractive to playful cats.
But otherwise, there is nothing special about aluminum. My cats love lightweight plastic balls just as much, or really anything in that general size/battability category.
- Tamerlane
Moved to IMHO.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
Not just for cats anymore. I have a dog that takes balls of foil & hides them in his house…
Because they think the foil will emerge from their asses as tinsel? :dubious:
A week ago a friend and I remembered this sage advice and tried to employ it to keep the kittens her family is fostering from jumping off the stairs onto the grandfather clock nearby. They thought the foil was a great new toy and hid under it. :smack:
Foil?
Ooh! Shiny!
(Pretty much the same reason I like foil.)
I’m still trying to figure out why this cat here goes absolutely nuts over those little plastic things from the caps of gallon milk jugs as if they were made of catnip on steroids. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Because they don’t have fillings in their teeth. 
My guess would be the sound.
When I lived at home (well I still live at home, my home, but I mean the home that I grew up in as a kid until I moved out. There is a thread about that somewhere else here, but I digress) we had three siamese cats. I found a long chain of metal beads, the kind they use for key chains and such. This one was from the bottom of vertical blinds that had broken off and was about 4 feet long. Our cats always enjoyed chasing string that we pulled along the floor, so I tried this thing. They went nuts for it! If they were in a deep sleep and I slid it on the floor, they would all come running before they even woke up!
I came in here to post exactly this. Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s aware of this phenomenon.
I also remember back in the 80’s my cats would go ape shit over those
“Whacky Wall Climbers”