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by Lore Sjöberg
Plastic Ring With a Ping-Pong Ball Inside
Cat bats ball, ball goes around ring, cat bats ball again. Neither the ball
nor the cat actually go anywhere. Now, generally, I avoid buying
pet toys that serve as metaphors for my own life, but in this case it's nice to
not have to reach under the couch of temporal reality to retrieve
the ping-pong ball of conscious existence because the cat of
spiritual dissatisfaction won't stop meowing. B
Catnip Anything
Very entertaining. Rub, roll, sniff,
sneeze, bat, chew, rinse, repeat. Anything that makes a cat
provide such antics with little or no effort on my part is
okay in my book. (My book being "Now We Are Six.") I don't know
if the stuff actually gets cats high as a Berkeley woodshop class,
but it's fun to pretend it does. A
Little Bits of Cardboard On a Wire
This is the most successful toy I've yet run into on
the "instant rapt cat attention" scale, which is a bit
annoying, considering it's just little bits of cardboard
on a wire. You (meaning "I") spend all this money
on jolly multicolored exotic cat diversions, and the little
loaves of fur end up enchanted by what appears to be leftover
jetsam from an attempt to jury rig the transmission on a 1966
VW Beetle. C+
Jingly Balls
Why put a bell inside a cat toy? Does it put cats in the mind
of stalking the rare-but-majestic musical stoat? Do cats in
the wild routinely hunt and take down tambourines? The only purpose
it seems to serve is to rudely awaken the cat owner in the middle
of the night. Given the repertoire of rude awakenings that your
average housecat commands (see "hairballs, hacking up"), I
don't think they need the encouragement. C-
Human Body Parts
Cheap and plentiful, all natural live human body parts are a
favorite of any discriminating feline. The major drawback, however,
is that many cats will, without warning, flick over from "play fighting"
to "frappé" in an instant. One second it's all good fun, and the
next you have a Warner-Brothers-esque cloud of fur and claws at the
end of your wrist. Even if you manage to pull your hand away before
unconsciousness descends, you have enough intensely painful lacerations
to cause an immediate upswing in the iodine futures market. C
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