I painstakingly crafted my cat, Irene an “activity” to try to stretch her little feline mind.
After watching her interact with it for ten minutes, I honestly don’t understand how she survived on the streets of Philadelphia as a feral cat. I think Stray Cat Blues was punking me when they penned her sob story and collected my three-figure adoption fee.
Irene’s pitiful critical thinking skills are clearly a handicap. The idea was for her to figure out how to get the cat treats out of the strung-up paper tubes which had been meticulously cut from a cardboard wrapping paper roll and strung together with an upholstery needle and a tawny hue of fuzzy yarn. The bottoms of the tubes are just barely folded in against themselves and I left the top of the tubes gaping conveniently open so that if Irene flipped them over with her razor-sharp claws, the treats would easily fall out, making it obvious how to retrieve more.
One of the incredibly smelly treats escaped when Irene accidentally flipped one of the tubes. The incident occurred as she moved her stout frame and impossibly round belly through the tubed length of yarn, bunting the tubes with her cheeks to mark the rattling cups on the string as her own. She was shocked to discover the treat resting on the basement floor beneath the contraption and assumed it had fallen like manna from heaven. It might as well have done so.
The rest of the treats are getting stale as I write this, twelve hours later. She is definitely more affectionate than she was four years ago, but let’s just say my cat is not an apex predator.
In fact, hanging that string of treats was like painting a “Welcome Hatfield Mice” sign in my basement. 😹
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