Molpe was really excited to see us return from our weekend trip, but she was even more excited that we did some late afternoon work in the back yard. This gardening resulted in the uprooting and crushing of some of her favorite cat drugs.These days Molpe is pretty dependent on catnip, catmint, or pretty much any of the herbs that go into Old Bay. The problem is she has been deprived of her weekly dose of synthetic mouse for too long -- going on two years now. Real rodentia can soothe her briefly, but she really craves these tiny plastic rattling cones covered with felt and leather with a tiny twitchy rawhide tail.
There are many, many different types of cat toy mice, but only one particular type has ever satisfied her. If it doesn't rattle, or the rattle is the wrong pitch; if it has nylon or Orlon synthetics; if the tail is made of fabric; if it has rope wrapped around it; if the eyes are felted instead of hard red plastic pegs; if it is too large or too small; if there is no black plastic peg for the nose; if it doesn't have tiny little felt ears; she can detect any slight difference and reject the impostor toy.
This is a problem, since as far as we can tell her dream drug mouse is no longer manufactured.
There are one or two types that are close enough approximations that she'll play with them for a few minutes. With her desired mouse toy, she'd bat and chase it around for up to an hour before settling down to devour every last little non-plastic bit of it, leaving behind nothing but a heavily macerated plastic shell with little rattling beads leaking out of it and three scattered nose and eye pegs.
This last week she broke into a cabinet where we store our substitute mice, and this was the result. Isn't it sad? She ate the tails and then gave up trying to get her buzz on. It makes you want to cry. Is it any wonder she's had to turn to harder drugs?
2 comments:
A friend of ours has a cat who fetches. Or at least she used to fetch. But she would only fetch a certain kind of small toy pig that was found in a board game of some sort. Once all the pigs disappeared, Beth had to hunt for a new game just to appease Simone. The things that we do for our cats, even though most of the time they act like they could care less about us.
Molpe used to fetch her favorite mice for us, too :-) She'd do that four or five times before she went into her own hunting, and then feeding, frenzy. Eventually she figured out that the fetch game just delayed the crunchy leathery goodness of the eating portion of the toy.
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