Re: Cat Toys?

Persia is getting older (8-10, don't really know). I'm trying
to get her to play more. [...]
Any recommendations for some inexpensive cat toys that might
stimulate her?

The absolute favourite toy with all our cats, from kittenhood to
very, very old, was free (thrown out in the rubbish). It's a few
feet of the cord that controls a certain kind of window blind - a
densely braided synthetic fibre cord with plastic beads moulded
onto it every half-inch or so (the beads act like the links on a
bicycle chain).

It needs a human on the other end. You swing it around the cat
and it can't resist chasing it. The beads are easy to grab but
the cord is too dense for their claws to catch in it, so they
quickly let it go and you try again. (Except for my little Mingus,
who never quite got the idea of letting go of anything - he gripped
it like grim death between his teeth, you could gently play him
like a fish). Our Chloe likes the challenge if you grip it by the
middle and swing both ends round her head at the same time to give
her two targets to aim at. Others prefer to chase it along the
floor like a snake. For such a simple object it's hours of fun,
and the first one we got lasted 15 years before we gave it away
with two of Marblecake's kittens when we rehomed them.

The other real hit, with Muriel and Zeke, was a plastic tarantula
with a jumping mechanism driven by a bulb and a few feet of air
tube. But they destroyed it in a few weeks.

What both of these have in common is that the real toy is the human.
No passive toy is ever going be as interesting as something worked
by an owner who cares and tries to understand how the cat thinks.

Both Marblecake's litters of kittens had a great time with a thing
I got from a charity shop for 1 pound. It's a kitten-sized tent or
Wendy house made of stiff carpeting, with no floor but a hole in the
side a few inches across. They're all over it, inside and out, for
hours every day. But really it's just a structure that helps them
play with each other.

============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
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