Does your cat have a favorite toy? What playful traditions do you and your cat engage in? As you have noticed, there are many types of toys at pet stores and in the pet section at most big box and department stores as well as your local grocery store. You may look at the toy display and imagine your kitty enjoying a tussle with a fish on the end of a wand, happily batting a bell ball around the house, climbing in and out of an elaborate cat tree. But the reality is, the cat may have preferences of her own.
Lily, for example, loves to carry around her small stuffed animals as if they were her kittens. Sophie pretends the baby possum toy is a mouse. She tosses it into the air and pounce on it over and over. But Lily’s favorite toy to play with is a wad of paper. Sophie likes to attack the strings, buttons, zipper pulls, sequins, etc. on your clothing—yes, while you’re wearing it. When Max was a kitten, we’d bring him those furry stuffed mice, which he’d tear apart as if it was a real mouse. He’d chew off the eyes, ears, tail and finally the little red pompom nose. Then he’d discard the soggy mouse body and play for hours with the tiny pompom.
Lily and I have a morning ritual. I clip the end off a plastic straw to use in sipping my 
coffee and she waits eagerly for me to flick that end out into the room. Some mornings, she plays with that straw nub for quite a while, involving me when it gets lost under a piece of furniture.
Like most pet owners, we’ve introduced many new toys to our household cats and they’ve rejected several of them. One of the most unsuccessful toys we tried (actually, this one was given to us as a “Welcome to the family, little feral kitty,” gift). But it was not suited to a recovering feral kitten.
We love wand toys around here and find them safe. But this wand toy had a cord attached with a toy dangling from the end of the cord. The first time ten-week-old Sophie felt that cord attempt to tangle around her, she panicked. We saw the potential danger in that toy and discarded it. However, when I went searching for lists of safe and unsafe cat toys this morning, the fishing pole-type toy was touted on several sites as being safe. Maybe for some cats. As it turned out, Sophie became interested in eating string and ribbon. So that makes any toy with cords, string, ribbon, raffia, etc. off limits for Sophie.
I know of a kitten that strangled to death when he was playing with a toy hanging from a wire coat hanger on his cat tree. To this day, I won’t leave a hanger anywhere near where a cat can get to it. Hyper-cautious, I know.
Cats often find their own favorite toys. And there are items that could be deadly or at least dangerous in their choices. We’ll discuss more specific household dangers tomorrow.
Probably the most exciting toy for our cats is the doomed moth or spider who makes its way into our house and that the cats find before we can carry it to safety. I have to say, it is entertaining to watch them leap and dance trying to capture the intruder. And good for their heart and their waistline. But make sure that what your cats are chasing is not a bee (some cats are allergic to a bee sting), a black widow, or other poisonous critter.
