Karl’s Asylum ... for the terminally deranged

Hex has had a good christmas, bless him. He’s gone back a stage on the Litter Kwitter again, but a lot of cats seem to, so I won’t hold it against him. i have plans with regard to it anyway.

He’s had a lot of new toys..although so far the 3 interchangeable sub £1 “Mousie”s are still the long term favourites. Another firm favourite is cable (zip) ties. If I bring any into the flat, they’re nabbed and hoarded immediately. He’s very possessive of cable ties. My hands are a testament to it.

Some of the toys, I have my doubts about. For instance…stuffed toy mice with sequins on. WHY? It’s a CAT. it will CHEW, SHRED and ATTEMPT TO DISEMBOWEL things. With “normal” mousie - fine. All he can do is “de-tail” it, and that’s soft. With a sequinned mousie, he’d EAT the sequins. That would not be good.

He’s had an octopus on elastic as well..it has pipecleaner legs, and a plastic ball hung underneath it with little “rattle” balls inside, and “googly” eyes.

This has been sat on the back of my chair…he’s attacked it over and over with a fair amount of speed, vigour and bloodyminded destructiveness. Bear in mind Hex is a VERY physical cat - flying leaps across the room with claws out to attack the “play” glove on my hand are not uncommon, and teeth and “disembowelling bunny feet” are frequently deployed to try and tear my hand off. I do encourage it though, on me at least. It’s good fo his development.

It’s been pinged and boinged about, often from a fair range into my back or the back of my head. Yesterday though, he was attacking it and I heard “Boing..snap! Tinkle, tinkle..”..

I turned to see what he’d done..and the octopus was still there. The ball however was missing. I thought “typical”.

A few minutes later, I heard the unmistakable “Nom nom” sound of Hex eating something, so I rugby tackled him and nicked it. it was a SHARP shard of plastic off the ball..it had shattered on impact with a carpet! When i found the ball itself, the rattly balls had fallen out. Hex ate one, I think. It’ll come out again.

Not impressed. Then he started trying to chew the googly eyes off. So I removed them before he managed - only to find just under the material behind them a collection of sharp, stiff wires where the legs all met. Safe? Not likely. I’ve removed the toy now.

All Hex’s toys will now be vetted I think. There seems to be debatable safety controls on animal toys. I wouldn’t have said it was child safe either. He may be “only a cat”, but..that’s no less a reason to ensure his safety. He’s currently somersaulting around the room chasing mousies, stalking and charging at me, and generally letting off some steam. He’s a big softy really, as Nanny Ogg would say.

Mousies apart, it’s more fun to invent toys for him. Laser pointers - good. Elastic - funny. Cable ties - £1 for loads - excellent fun value. Everything else is limited by imagination.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 12:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.