What is it about those toys?

It's not really a behavior question, more me musing out loud. I'm getting older you know and I do talk to myself a lot more. :lol3:

What is it about these cat toys? Why can Abby be in the room, totally calm and all of a sudden something about a toy calls to her and she unleashes a full on assault? I get when she is walking down the hall and there is a toy along the way and she feels the need to smack it as she goes by. It's really the out of the blue attacks I wonder about. :dk:

The usual subject of these attacks is her favorite toy. "Big Gray Mouse must die". Yes, this is what my husband and I call the toy. I think the name speaks for itself. No toy will irritate her as much as this one.

This picture is from December of 2005:



The love seat she is on and the blanket are long gone, as are most of her other toys from back then, but Big Gray Mouse Must Die lives on. :dk:


Does your cat have a particular toy that just seems to need a random smack down every so often?

That's funny!  Love the name.  

There's no particular toy here that gets that treatment, but our old cat Travis did a toy smack down this morning--he actually startled me and I watched to make sure he wasn't having a seizure or something.  LOL  He was just walking across the room, heading towards his usual spot on the couch, but then spied this old green felt fish toy on the floor and BAM, the attack was on.  Lasted for about 10 seconds and then he just dropped it and continued on his trajectory to the couch.  It was a funny little spurt of energy.

:lol3::lol3::lol3: :heart3: Abby :heart3: Around here it's a hard plastic ball that lights up. Most of the time it just lies innocently on the floor in the kitchen, totally ignored, but Mogli has episodes when "light-up bally" has to be feverishly whacked.

Wow, that is a BIG gray mouse!!

It may not surprise you to know, AbbysMum, that my two go a little crazy about ping pong balls.

I love Big Grey Mouse Must Die! And that is one huge meece! What a beautiful picture of Abby! 

Around here, it's Pinky. Pinky is a teeny little mouse who used to be pink in color, but has since had pretty much all of her fur chewed off and is naked. Naked Pinky is not pretty, but honestly, Tabby just loves that mouse. She is constantly playing with Pinky, batting her up and down the steps, constantly arguing and yelling at Pinky (when Pinky starts arguing back, I'm going to seriously wonder about the state of my mental health!).

And help us all, when Tabby has lost Pinky, she lets us know. Loudly. Nothing is funnier than Tabby jumping up on the couch, sitting down between Rick and me and telling us her Pinky Tale of Woe. She looks so upset when Pinky is lost. We always do everything we can to find her. One day I couldn't find her anywhere and got another mousie out of the container. Red fur, so we started to call her Red. Tabby wanted nothing to do with Red and walked around the house meowing pitifully. And eventually I found Pinky; she was "trapped" in the bathroom closet. (I consider looking for Pinky a way to get house work done.) I tossed Pinky down on the living room floor. Tabby yelled "Pinky!" and pounced. And life was good in their world again.

Tabby loves Pinky. So nothing was sweeter one night when Rick and I were eating dinner. Tabby jumped up on the table with Pinky in her mouth. She walked over to between Rick and me and dropped Pinky on the kitchen table. What a gift!   We thanked her profusely, told her what a good girl she was, and then Tabby picked Pinky up and took off again. Sometimes Tabby will bring Pinky to bed with her and sometimes I'll check on Tabby when she's napping in the cat tree and Pinky is right there with her. One morning, Tabby was napping on the pink blankie on the kitchen table and when I gave Tabby a good-bye touch, I saw Pinky at her paw.

You have to smile. You just have to smile.

Oh yea!  Cocoa goes into full attack mode on little sparkle balls.  From 0 to 60 in seconds.  She also has a ball which has chirpy/birdy noises and what sounds like a female Japanese voice in it.  Those are the two that set her off into crazytown.

And Casper, just this morning, grabbed a receipt from our coffee table and went bonkers chasing it.  Mind you, he's nearly 13 and energetic playing is not something which happens frequently anymore but wow, this morning he was on a roll.  I crumpled it up and tossed it several times with him chasing it like pray.  He finally lost it under a radiator and I wasn't about to find it for him at 6:30 am 

Oliver has three mice that are all the same size and shape, but one is dark gray, one is light gray, and the other is blue. The dark gray is his favorite, even though it no longer squeaks like the other two, though the light gray one is puttering out. Anyway, he will go nuts with that mouse. He'll get similarly enthusiastic about the other two, but only if he can't find dark one. I don't know what he prefers about. It has a little tail while the light one has feathers, and the blue one has a bunch of little dangly tails. Maybe that it looks the most like a real mouse is why he loves it. 

I love hearing about all the kitties favorite toys that need a beating. :lol3: