cat Investigations on Jasper’s behalf

I’m going away for another long weekend, and I’m feeling guilty. He’s been slightly destructive lately—nothing irreplaceable has been fully destroyed—and I figure he’s tired of his toys and needs new ones, maybe ones with a little more staying power.

So I Googled best cat toys and the first link was this page on About.com. Normally I can’t stand About.com, but Adblock makes it much, much more tolerable.

One of the toys on that list is something called the Peek-a-Prize Toy Box. I found this intriguing, because at the very least it would allow me to give Jasper some small toys without having them instantaneously placed under the range or under the refrigerator or at the base of the foyer steps where he refuses to carry them back up. It looked like a cool toy. I was turned off by the reviewer having named her cat “Jaspurr,” of course, but it looked like a cool toy.

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Simple, right? But genius, because those holes are barely bigger than paw-sized, and just difficult enough to be intriguing, and once something with a bell or squeaker was inside it’d be irresistible. I couldn’t find it online, though, for a price I wanted to pay sight unseen. There is a smaller version available for cheaper, but I was burned by the smaller version of the Crazy Circle, which just isn’t as fun as the big one. He likes it, he’s just not committed. And the Amazon reviews of the Peek-a-Prize are wildly divergent.

So I made my own. Just to see if he’d be into it.

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I know it looks ghetto—it’s hard to cut circles, and I guessed really wrong on the size at first and had to recut most of them—but he is deeply into it. Watch this movie. Seriously.

At the end he gets fed up and walks away, right? Except NOT. He went right back. That’s happened at least five more times. He stalks away but he can’t stay away. He hasn’t gotten anything out of it yet but he’s been at it for a solid half-hour.

I figure I’ll leave it for him for the weekend and order him the real one on Monday.

GOOD TOY.