Calling cat owners

My cat used to play with his poop. I'm not kidding. I'd catch him batting pieces of it around. I HATED that. Man did I hate that. I'm not sure how he grew out of the habit, but he no longer does that.

This is weird, though it's not something he plays with - he likes to bury himself underneath the blankets. I'll find him sleeping underneath the comforter in our guest bedroom, or if he sleeps on our bed, he sleeps against my legs underneath our blankets. Very odd.

But I love him.

Boxes, definitely boxes. And champagne corks. One of my cats loves to play in the sink too -- she waits for me to turn on the faucet and plays with the drips.

By the way, I think you should change the title of the thread to "Calling all people owned by cats."

Wine corks too. One our cats went crazy over uncooked corncobs.

I don't know if this falls in the catagory of "play," but I've been owned by several purebred Siamese, and most will stop when encountering a long electrical cord, rope, or hose and seriously slap down on it--several times, until satisfied it's "dead."

Most have heard that Siamese were ancient palace guards in Siam, but what can a cat guard against?

Snakes, I'm told. They smack the snake's body so that it'll raise its head, then they go into aggressive/defensive tactics that include high springs into the air, more slaps, and the seizing of the snake by its throat when opportunity arises.

With two or three of my Siamese, if I move the cord/rope/hose, then these slaps and acrobatics go on until the cat realizes it's not a snake. Funny and instructive.

One of my cats stole the dropper top from his empty medicine bottle and played with that for months. Another adopted a soft pink pig eraser and played "fetch" with it until it was lost.

I had a cat ten years ago who used to play fetch with a magnet.

It was a plain magnet piece, about the size of a quarter, with a hole in the center. For no reason at all one day, I decided to tie a four-foot long piece of red lace to around the magnet. I started swinging it, and Tigger started jumping. I'd drag it along the floor and he'd chase after me, desperate to catch it.

Then he started dragging it around the house, little red lace trailing behind him. So I picked it up one day and tossed it down the hallway. He chased after and came back with it. I threw it again. He retrieved it. It was our favorite toy for a lot of years. It was buried with him when he died.

One of mine loves to play with beads. And we have lots of them with a crafty 8yo girl in the house. You wouldn't believe how noisy they are on a wood floor.

The light spot on the wall/floor/cabinets from the sun's reflection off my wristwatch. Really funny to be doing dishes and hear smack, smack, smack as the cat chases the light on the wall across the room from where I'm standing.

Insects that manage to get in - moths, june bugs, wasps (although the wasps frequently deliver a fat lip or appendage before the cat does them in).

Milk jug tops. It's just about a matter of you name and one of cats will play with it. Puma

We had a cat whose favorite toy was the dogs. The golden lab was a jungle gym (yes, he totally just laid there for the cat to climb on him, hang off his head, etc). The funniest thing was when we'd call the dog and he'd come in with the cat still hanging off the side of his face.

Same cat would also play with my mixed breed dog. He (cat) would come up and soft-paw THWAP her (dog) on the muzzle until she'd chase him around the house. Then she'd catch him, roll him over and mouth his belly until he laid still. Then she'd go back to lie down, he'd clean himself off and come back and TWHAP her again. They'd do this for HOURS.

The cat has since died, unfortunately. He was a great cat.

A catsitting adventure in the apt. building I lived in: I'm at the apt. door and notice a long plastic tube halfway under the door. It looks familiar. I open the door and pick it up, and see another, slightly larger, then a torn wrapping and a shredded cotton wad with a woven string attached. It's a new tampon! The perfect toy! Crackly outer wrapper, rolling plastic bits and clawable cotton hunk with a string. I told the cat's owner and she was mortified :}

Our younger cat likes to drop her mice and bits of crumpled paper in the water dish and make soup...

One of my cats liked to play with paper balls we made by crumpling any piece of paper. He put the paper ball inside a shoe and tried to take it out. We often found the paper balls inside our shoes when we were going to put them on.

When I lived with my mom and her cats, they always carried around the peel off portion of a gallon of milk..u know the pull tab part so you can twist the cap off..well that thing, the thing u twist off...they love'd them. They'd get it in their mouth and run around then bat it around, then run with it some more. Wierdos.

The plastic thing that covers the bolt that holds your toilet to the floor. He would get it off, maneuver it across the carpeted landing, knock it down the carpeted stairs to the tiled entry, then play 'hockey' with it for hours. thwack, thwack, thwack. Drove us nuts. We finally just left the bolt uncovered. Ain't cats great?

MM

My cat Phoebe once had a pet BeanieBaby. She eventually lost interest, but she must have carried that thing around for two years.

Phoebe also has a paper fetish, especially toilet paper. If she catches me tearing off a length, I have to let her kill it a few times. She shreds newspaper, too. Fortunately, printer paper isn't the right texture for her.

This was just a one-off, but a couple of weeks ago I was doing a sudoku and my other cat, Sophie, suddenly decided she needed to kill my pencil. It was really strange because Sophie usually isn't playful at all.

My third cat, Carrie, will play with just about anything. Sometimes I find her in the kitchen, chasing a nugget of cat food around the room.

A cat I had years ago kept a pecan hidden somewhere in the living room. He played with it in the middle of the night. (An interesting noise to wake up to)

Generally, though, none of my cats have ever had much interest in bought toys. Not the three I have now; not any I've ever had in the past. They've always prefered found objects: golf balls, plastic bottle caps, scraps of paper, anything dangly or string-like. It's not unusual to wake up in the morning and find some odd small object in the middle of the floor. When my daughter was younger, her toys were always a fertile source for the cats.

Oh, yeah, cardboard boxes. Any size from shoeboxes on up. Those are very important in my household. It's always amusing when cat A is sleeping inside of a box and cat B decides to sit on top of the same box, which holds the flaps closed. Then cat A wakes up, ready to do something else now, thankyouverymuch.

Wine corks, foam ear plugs, and the crinkly security wrapping around the nozzle of saline solution bottles.

I own a blue point Persian who will play with most fast moving things, but her daughter, a half-mog is the neighbourhood's deadliest serial killer. (Her record was 7 corpses in a day, of the furry four and feathery two-legged variety left on the doorstep) As she has now been grounded because she wandered off for 10 whole weeks, she has to find her own fun where she can. Insects, however, are beneath her dignity. She will torture a daddy-long-legs (crane fly) until it is almost dead, sniff it, and then decide that it is such paltry prey that she sticks her white-tipped cute nose in the air and walks away in disdain. Spiders receive a similar treatment, and moths are so far beneath her that she simply watches them circling the air above her with a look of pure contempt on her face.

What she does love, however, are toy mice that look like the real deal. Squeaky plastic things hold her attention for about a minute before she decides they are no fun, but get one of those fluff covered things from the supermarket and she will not only spend hours chasing and torturing it, she will actually try to bite its head off (this being her favourite mode of despatch for her real prey).

And never underestimate the attraction an owner has for a cat. Scarlet (the serial killer) has been known to wait on your pillow for your eyelashes to flicker open and shut. She finds that hilarious and very, very fascinating.... She also loves keyboards, and has been known to join in on an MSN session.

So, Wombat - if you want to give your cat some attitude in your story...

My cat loves the big green Barnes & Noble bags -- chews on them, bats them around, hides in them. No other bags -- just those.

She also loves the dog's dry food. She won't eat it, but will steal pieces and bat them around the floor until they're lost. Drives my poor black lab crazy!

-- Marcy

Q-tips...I finally had to start giving my boy cat clean ones to play with so he'd stop digging them out of the trash. Always fun to find a used, chewed-on, wet q-tip in your shoe.

Like others have said, cardboard boxes. If there's a box around, my cat will be sitting in it.

Also plastic bags. She loves to run inside a plastic bag, then go crazy trying to get out of it/get it off of her.

Mine loves my dreadlocks, which is sometimes a bit of a surprise! Rope is also a winner (obvious similarities). And the lights that flash on my router during the night - he plays with the spare ethernet cable beside it. Oh, and dead voles. He *loves* playing with them at around 4am - on my carpet.

My grandmother's cat liked foil wadded up into a ball, but not just any foil. It had to be foil that was previously wrapped around a chocolate bar. Seriously, you could toss two otherwise identical foil balls on the ground, and the cat only played with the one that smelled like chocolate.

First, there are no owners of cats. There are cats that allow humans to dwell in their houses, as long as they provide food and clean the litter.

Now, regards toys. One of the two cats that allow me to live in their house is a cross-eyed semi-obese Siamese that likes marbles. And not just any old marbles, these have to be clear glass. We had a decorative jar of these on a low shelf, and she tipped it over one day when she was little more than a kitten, and fell in love with them. She plays retrieve with them, carrying them up to me in her mouth, dropping on the kitchen floor and rolling them around, and yowling in that delightful Siamese manner for me to throw the thing somewhere so she can chase it. She will ignore any marble that has a color pattern, or is dark. The other thing that turns her crank is a laser pen light.

The other cat is a more normal torty-shell, who likes toy mice, especially the ones that squeak. Neither cat will play with the other one's favorites.

caw

Our cat, Casey used to love pipecleaners. I'd take two, twist them together (into an X) and the cat would zip all over the house with them until they vanished under something.

My mom had a cat that loved aluminum foil - crush into a ball and the cat would play soccer all over the house. When he got tired, he pick up the ball and cart it off to wherever he kept all of his stuff (all cats have a secret stash of toys somewhere) and he'd growl all the while he was holding it.

The plastic sealed-for-your-protection thingy from infant Tylenol drops, the pull-off strip thingy from milk cartons, pen caps, the red dot from a laser pointer - these were a few of Casey's favorite things as well...

She died in Aug 07 - I miss this nutty stuff she used to do...