Cat folks, what toys (items) do your cats like to play with?

lasers.

@ragingloli Have one. Thanks, though. :)

Laser pointer, string, ribbon, balls, stuffed mousies, paper bags, boxes, and my male “Myles” is obsessed with my pony tail holders. He fishes them off the bathroom counter, zings them around and drops them in his food dish for safekeeping. lol
At night he will pull out my pony tail while I sleep and steal the elastics.
Seriously, out of about 50 pony tail bands I can only find about 4 right now.

They are all over the house, somewhere. haha

@Coloma Check under the stove and fridge! That’s where I found a bunch of pens! lol

^ Be careful with many of the items you have listed. We recently removed 32 hair scrunchies from the stomach of a Siamese. And cats are notorious for eating string and ribbon (and requiring a $2000 surgery to remove them, as my sister learned the hard way).

Overgrown kitten is the one on the right in my photo. The one on the left is a 14 boy!

My cats love their scratching post! Also, every now and than they’ll play with a small ball. Oddly enough, momma cat stole a barbie doll from my flea market stuff and plays with that from time to time. Go figure. I put the 2 small kittens in a gigantic dog cage at night and they love climbing up and all over that thing.

For the past three days it has been a covered, black rubber band for holding a pony tail.

The other is a piece of foil tied to a string attached to a long branch from a black birch tree.

My floors are strewn with bright plastic balls with bells inside, plush fake birds with long tail feathers and yellow tennis balls. Milo never touches them.

Often the laces of my sneakers while I am wearing them.

The scratching posts and the cane doors of my bureau are popular. Here

Blaze only likes his catnip-stuffed felt mouse, his feathers-on-a-fishing-pole, and his corrugated cardboard scratcher. He ignores his real-fur mice and non-feathered string.

Strings that she can rip to shreds, yep even at 17 she loves to rip most strings apart. As long as she doesn’t have to move much…lol hence the string does all the moving and only my cats paws flail all over once she catches it she chews it then I pull it away and we start over. :)

At her age its more like forepaw exercises.

A paper bag is sure to provide hours of viewing pleasure for the non-feline residents.

Many of the toys I use have been stated above. A few that have not cardboard box, a feather or fur delight on an elastic string hanging from a stick. Cat springs.
Oh and my cat loves to chase after her dental treats. But some times I hide them too. Sewing patterns a crystal hanging from the window. Newspapers. Cat springs. High furniture is her exercise routine when not outside jumping from one surface to another. Even balancing on closet doors.

On advice from the collective, I bought a snazzy little laser light that Milo has had shown no interest in and had not a second of interaction with it. I, OTOH, love to play w. it.

Thanks for the responses. My guy is easy to please. I caught him the other day batting around and chasing a coffee bean. :)

Organically grown, I hope?

Very small grey toy mouse, has to have a pink nose. Nothing with bells in, unless you need to put her outside!

@Mama_Cakes Yes, I do find a lot of them in the kitchen pantry where they slide under the door.
@syz Yikes! Well…so far I don;t think he is ingesting them, just losing them around the house. Hmmm…now I am worried. :-(

My cat plays with everything but the expensive toys we’ve bought for her.

Straws, string, flashlight beams, and the almighty hair tie. They have mystical powers.

My cat has never really cared for toys I buy him. On the other hand if I tie a piece of string to a stick he goes crazy. If I can find a bird feather to tie to the end of the string then he goes absolutely insane for it, often performing crazy ninja jumps and attacks on the feather as it flies through the air above him.

Paper bags and cardboard boxes also seem to provide hours of endless entertainment.

@syz Yea, that’s the only downside to the string thing. If I leave him unattended with it he tries to eat it.

@gailcalled Actually, they are. Yep.

I recently purchased a window seat and put it up so my cats can look at the feeders. Costello will steal bread ties, even before you put it on the counter it is gone. She also likes to put it into her water dish. Safe keeping maybe-she probably thinks that Abbott (cat) and Snap (dog) can’t swim to get them. They also like paper bags and boxes to hop in and out of.
But her absolute favorite thing—her tail. She chases that tail morning noon and night and unfortunately late night too. She caught it the other day and almost fell off the chair. I actually think I saw the dog laughing!

My cat (RIP) loved rubber bands, balls of foil, and the plastic rings from the top of gallon jugs (the ring that stays on the bottle when you take the cap off).

She would wake me up by dropping a rubber band on my chest. “Morning, time to play fetch!”

Hair bows, laser pointer, and balled up pieces of paper is all my cat needs.

I wanted so bad for Schrödinger to like the laser pointer. He bats at the dot for a second, then when it moves, he looks at me like, “Hey, Ma, put my dot back.” That’s just boring.

I’ve crocheted mice for him… but trees best toy was the bird I made out of duck feathers. Stuck that baby on a toy fishing line and went to town.

Until my son broke the fishing rod.

Now Dinger just plays with scrunchies.

My cat loves string, especially strings with frayed ends or with something attached to the end.

One of my cats’ favorites is just a small piece of paper, scrunched up into a ball. They also enjoy the ‘kitty fishing poles’- one that I made, and one that I bought.

^^^ Oh yeah, mine too! Forgot about that.
I used to have a cat ( he’s been dead for 15 years now, lived to 16 ) and he was a major paper shredder. Money included!
Once he kiped a $20 bill off the dresser and shredded it. He would sit up like a Chipmonk, hold the paper in his paws and rip and spit.

I have him on video. Oh..miss my old “Groucho.”

Again with the hair ties – my boys have them hidden under every surface in the house! They’re also partial to my sneaker shoelaces, the sneakers themselves (Arnie actually chews leather like a dog) and if I leave a hoodie laying around, I’m pretty much guaranteed that the next morning there will be no string in it.

Of course, the laser always works great, but I think they get the greatest enjoyment out of the nightly WWF (cat version) bout! Oh, and last week, I spilled half a bag of catnip which landed on both the cats and all over the carpet. They had a blast with that!

laser
fuzzy mice
jingly balls
my one cat loves crinkly bag packages, like those used for cookies.
and every cat I have ever had loves fabric tape measures

A friend of mine’s mother’s cat died from ingesting string. I never leave anything around like that at all anymore

http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/prod_display.cfm?pcatid=17645&ref=6137&subref=NA&cmpid=PPC-B-6137
My cats go crazy for Da Bird. Best cat toy ever!

Funny thing is my cat will not touch birds toys or lasers. My dog though, goes freaking nuts. One time she saw this almost
(mini cooper size I swear) pterodactyl looking kite going down at the park and almost took my arm off going after it like she thought she was trained for hunting. The kite before it fell was even making huge fluttering noises coming from the wings that caught her attention.

I also had a cat who loved to go after birds at a young age so much and one time while we were at the trailer she saw a bird and stalked it, and stalked it, and ran as fast as she could to get it BAM! right into the trailer window. Yes because she was an indoor cat. :/ She lived until she was 18.

I also forgot to say that christmas time provides my cat with cheer every year. Puts me through hell :/ Even last year at 16, her eyes lit up as soon as she heard the crinkle of the fake xmas tree which she loves to chew arggghhhhh. When we tried a real xmas tree she climbs right up the middle of those and wreaks havoc on your decorations. The decorations themselves are great dangly things that I find sometimed on the floor. I dread the christmas tree. Christmas trees are great toys. :/ Just remember no tinsel type decorations which is like almost all of them.

My cat has been eating christmas trees for 16 years and every year I freak out I really freaked out about 5 years ago when she was eating the fiber optics christmas tree…glass pieces..great but shes still alive and she will be eating it again this year and I will freak out again.

My cat plays with anything other than what I’ve purchased for her to play with.

The first few months after adopting the cat, I made a concerted effort to provide toys for her to provide the proper mental stimulation.

Spent quite a bit of money before I learned the only stimulation that cat requires is training me to open doors or feed her.

This is when’s she’s not amusing herself with walking on me, climbing up my body to lounge on my shoulders…

…or the ever popular digging her claws into various soft parts of my upper body.

I’m her toy.

@KaY Jelly I almost forgot about the Christmas trees. No matter what type (shape, size, real, unreal) Costello always starts climbing it when I start to assembly it. I only put up 4 ft trees now (getting older-still love Christmas but less hassle with decorations) I put up 3 of them. She is not a tiny cat although she weighs only about 71/2 lbs, she is long and lean-oh, yeah, and extremely agile. She can snake her way up to the top of the tree before I can blink an eye. Luckily most of my ornaments are unbreakable because her and Abbott play hockey all winter long (or as long as the tree is up). No one ever wins but they have a great time knocking them around. They are so entertaining—it is better than watch the tube.

Heh…sooo, pulled out the drawer under the stove and found about 12 pony tail ties. Myles is NOT eating them, just zinging them under the stove and fridge. Bonus…it was amazingly clean under there only one dust bunny. haha

@Pooh54 Yes! Sounds exactly like my house, but I have one cat and she is a show all her own. I have real pictures of her as a kitten while she climbed right up the middle to the top of the real Xmas. lol. She also likes jewelry and how could I forget the tinfoil ball!!!
Hours of cheap fun.

Playing fetch with a cat, she loves the sound of tinfoil, that’s probably what started the Christmas crinkle crazy tree madness! :/

—It’s all because of that first tinfoil ball.

Tinfoil Anonymous for kitties…nuff said—. :-[

Ball of yarn.

Last night MIlo discovered the elastic shoe laces that I had purchased, erroneously thinking that they could make one pair of walking shoes into slip-ons. They can’t but Milo loves these, for today at least.

(I can cram my feet into the shoes with the elastic shoelaces, but the tongue gets jambed, so the experiment is a bust.)

@gailcalled Lesson learned-thank you. I won’t buy them. At least they make a good cat toy.

@Pooh54: Recommended by pre-operation class OT before my impending knee surgery. It sounded like such a good idea in theory. You’re better off with sneaks with velcro or simply high-quality clogs.

Well..I bought two new toys yesterday at a pet shop that is going out of biz. They are missing already. Sheesh!

@Coloma We have a soft squid toy for our little guy. Went missing for two months (I looked everywhere!). When my partner came back from a trip up North, “Squidward” was in the middle of the living room floor. :)

Squidward.

@Mama_Cakes haha

True story.
A few years ago the cats had a stuffed gopher/hamster toy.
One morning when it was still dark I was walking through my living room and the lost gopher toy was lying on the carpet.
I was like ” Oooh, there’s that toy, I wonder where it has been all this time?”

I bend over to pick it up and it was a real, dead gopher! lol
So much for cat doors.