I’ve spent tons of bucks on kitty toys over the years, yet the toys my cats love most often are the ones that cost little or nothing. A recent example: Dougy went into a fun frenzy when my sister Kathy dangled a drinking straw in front of him! It was as if he were in a kitty dreamland of fun….
Sometimes the simplest things make great toys. I found an orange golf ball once when hiking. What it was doing out there is a good question. I brought it in and cleaned it up. The cats love it though!
That sort of toy (one they can bat around) is a =favorite here, too. A dropped unshelled walnut turned out to be their favorite of all time, followed by plastic balls with bells in them. I keep finding both under and behind things, where they ended up during play.
I must try these straws. Your two aren’t the only kitties I’ve heard go crazy over the straws.
Jean
It’s a small step from attacking pencils and pens to hitting on straws….!
Hitting on them….sounds like they’re asking the straws for a date! haha
Yeah, a date to die a horrific death between the “Shockingly-sharp Razor Teeth of Total Destruction”!
doesn’t it figure-lai loved the box more than the toy.
Almost without fail!
I wonder what Dougy would do if you hooked about six straw together? Would he be able to figure out how to take them apart?
I think he’d eventually accidentally get them apart.
So true…MOL 😀 Pawkisses 🙂 <3
Yet we still buy those expensive kitty toys, thinking “This one will be the magic cat toy they prefer over the box it came in!” LOL!
It’s the little things.
Absolutely! My cats even invented a toy with a wand toy that I accidentally misplaced, then they found. It’s sort of a keep away game that starts with Andy yowling loudly (he’s usually very quiet) while standing over the toy. That is the signal to Dougy to come running. From there, they ignore the toy, but chase each other back and forth through the apartment. I guess the toy served=s as a gauntlet of sorts.
That’s cute. I wish mine liked each other.
It helps a lot because they can keep each other company. There were two others in their litter, a boy and a girl, who went to a family is South Dakota. The report is the two hate each other! So…I got the two good ones.
Mine are male and female. I think he’d be friends. It’s her that won’t allow it. She’s older and had a past life as a stray. She’s not very trusting. She swats him a lot, and then he’ll chase her because he gets fed up. Kitty squabbles.
My late ginger tabby cat, Louie, was really sweet as a cat around people, but he had a terrible attitude about other cats. He was a big bully, in fact, toward other cats, and was big enough that he could beat up most other kitties. He, too, had been a stray that I got from the local shelter, so he had an earlier life having to do what it took to get food or shelter.
The photo is of the little bear is great.
The best toys have always been something not made to be a cat toy. Kosmo loves paper balls, they “fly” high, and he plays his own basket ball standing on his back legs.
Andy loves pens and pencils. Dougy (as documented here) loves straws and string. Both love knocking over waste paper baskets to find paper to play with. Both love to claim magazines and newspapers for kitty purposes.
Rusty (my profile photo), my Exotic Shorthair of 11 years now, loves straws. It’s one of the toys that gets him most excited. However, they disappear too soon – under couches, wall units, etc. When that happens, he looks up at me, waiting for another one to fall on the floor so he could push it around. 🙂
Cute! I once accidentally dropped a walnut on the floor, and both cats came running to bop it around like a soccer ball. Now, if i get unshelled walnuts, I try to share them with the boys for their amusement!
Of course. Their amusement is ours, too!
Absolutely! It’s payment for all the damage they do to our furniture, for example. LOL!
It is almost time for horse chestnuts here – and my kitty loves herself a nice chestnut. She’ s bonkers with conkers (the British name for horse chestnuts).
I don’t know if mine would eat them, but they definitely would love them for kitty football/soccer!! (They already will use unshelled walnuts for that sort of play.) Yes, chestnuts are great to eat, too!
Horse chestnuts are not eaten by my cats, just used as kitty football.
Oh! OK! That makes more sense, and certainly makes them good German kitties, eh? I guess they must be members, then, of the Deutsch Katze Fußball-Liga!
I cannot get them to sign the club papers … You know how fanatic Germans are about red tape.
True, but that’s also a good quality when it comes to times like negotiating a signing bonus for 200,000,000 euros. You don’t want there to be any confusion about what you expect of your kitty footballers! LOL!
Well, fanatical or not, when you sign your kitties to a bonus to play five years, you want some documentation to justify that 100,000,000 euro bonus! LOL!
Bottle caps make for a rousing game of soccer, if you happen to have wood or tile floors.
Oh yeah! I don’t have too many hard-surfaced floors where i live, but the kitty boys love to play with things like that in those rooms for the reason you note!
If I drop something like that, it can be very difficult to find, since – with kitty power – things can take on a life of their own.
How very true! I sort of know now to look under and behind things for items I drop or accidentally misplace where cats might come by.
A swifter helps a lot for getting things out from under low stuff, but it probably wouldn’t be useful with carpet.
No, but I do have one of those Dyson vacuums designed to handle pet hair, and it takes on Persian cat hair like a champion!
We have a Roomba designed for pets that does a great job, except for when Saphera sheds … When that happens, we take her into the yard, hook the shop vac up to blow and turn it on her… thankfully, hair and fur is good organic matter for the garden because we get a bushel off her.
LOL! I laugh because I have no doubt “get a bushel off her” is no exaggeration! If I didn’t keep a clutter house, I’d like the Roomba. Chris (of the “contrafactual” blog) has a Roomba and speaks highly of it, too. He has three kitties to contribute challenges to the Roomba.
My friend, Maggie, has 2 dogs and loves her roomba – she keeps her 2 clipped, like you do your boys, so they aren’t the challenge Saphera is.
I like the idea of the Roomba.
The only thing I dislike about Twinkletoes is that she can get stuck in the most inconvenient places, like under the bed, where she somehow got hold of the strap from a briefcase…
In my apartment, there are many places like that. I also thing there’s be problem with kitty toys getting caught in the Roomba. I sometimes have to dig them out of the Dyson!
Purr & M are very good about picking up their toys … well, Purr is, since she’s the only one that actually plays with toys, so that isn’t an issue for Twinkletoes.
Andy and Dougy are like me: Chaos is OK, and we don’t do a good job of picking up our messes….!
My husband prefers organized clutter … this might be a guy-thing.
I think it is, Jean. It’s a characteristic of guys women need to keep in mind when they agree to marry or live with them! LOL!
He can be quite fastidious about some things, but I often suspect that males and females have different ways of seeing order. In our house, we have most things divided. For instance, I load the dishwasher and my husband puts away the clean dishes.
I think you are right.
That is funny. They always prefer the box to whatever is in it too 🙂
That is for sure!
People are the best toys (& Beds).
Ha! Ha! How true! Dougy especially likes to annoy me and toy with me while i sleep! Of course, it is fair to say I annoy and toy with him during the day while he tries to sleep.
I must confess sometimes I seek them out just to make sure the aren’t too rested for my bedtime, especially my bundle of energy Burmese kitten (I have to stop calling him that he’s a year old).
Ha! Ha! I suspect you aren’t alone in this practice! (I confess i have done this, too!)