Non-Approved Cat Toy

My cats have different tastes when it comes to playthings.  Evil Kitty has an old, beaten up, fuzzy red heart with a bell on it that she occasionally batts around the house.  Susan prefers a simple length of yarn to chase or the occasional strand of dental floss that Paul teases her with.  Outside Kitty has a more varied selection of cat toys.  He has a large furry rat that rattles and he will carry that around in his maw for a while before sitting on it and doing the crazy-claw-attack with his back paws.  He also adores chasing around a ratty catnip mouse tied to a length of ribbon and dragged behind my daughter, around the kitchen table, up and over the couch and into the bedroom.   And of course, everybody loves the laser pointer.

Outside Kitty not only has a basket filled with cat toys, but he also has a annoying cute habit of wanting you to play with him and his toys in the middle of the night.  He'll select a toy from the basket, do the midnight-crazies thing with it throughout the bedroom, then bring the toy up on the bed wanting you to throw it to him.  If the toy is placed within two inches of my still sleeping hand or near my foot,  I'll toss it / kick it off the bed and hope he goes away and leaves me alone.

This pathetic collection of toys does not amuse me, human slave.

A few days ago, I noticed that Outside Kitty came inside through the "cat door" (i.e. a flap of sliding door screen that has torn at the bottom and is now the official cat door.  Convenient, yet hillbilly all at the same time.)  After a while, I also noticed that he was doing the midnight-crazies thing, but in the middle of the afternoon.  I went to find out what the ruckus was and found that he had a new cat toy; a live mouse.

He has obviously learned that if he has one of these "moving meat" cat toys, I will come and take it away from him.  He wouldn't let me get close enough to him so that I could grab the still very much alive mouse out of his mouth.  Every time I got down on the floor and reached for him, he'd give a little muffled growl through his furry-rodent-filled maw.  So finally I just sat down with him in the kitchen hoping that he would drop the mouse and give me the opportunity to smash it with my boot.  Well, he did drop it.  And walked away, letting the mouse run under the dishwasher or the refrigerator, I lost track of it after frantically trying to chase it on all fours and hurling a boot at it.

Later that night, I was awakened by his "Play with MEEE" meowing and a crazed shuffling around the bedroom floor, under the bed, into the bathroom and then out into the kitchen....then back into the bedroom for more crazed-cat-toenails-on-the-laminate flooring before I realized that, shit, he probably had the mouse.  I rolled my sluggish and still-melatonin-medicated self out of bed and found him in the living room with the moving meat toy (i.e. half-paralyzed but still very much alive mouse).  Again, he was not going to give up his plaything so I sat on the floor with Susan and Evil Kitty and the three of us watched him play with the poor, half-dead rodent and hoped that he would eventually bore of it and walk away.  Which he did not.

OMG, Outside Kitty looks immense in this pic.  

So I eventually feigned non-interest and turned the computer on and watched funny cat videos.  I finally heard silence and turned around to see that the mouse had finally expired.  Thinking that he was tired of the thing I went to pick the soggy gray mass of fur, but he snatched it away before I could grab it.  I went back to the computer and then heard the soft, moist gnashing of a cat's jaws and watched him finish a midnight snack.  Yuck.

I went back to bed, but couldn't fall asleep because I was waiting for the sound of the cat yacking up the chewed and slobbery remains of the mouse on the rug.  Which, luckily, did not happen.  Or at least I'm saying that it did not happen as I have yet to stumble upon any chunky-mouse-bits cat vomit.  I may still find it in the corner of the laundry room or flip it out of the pile of blankets on the bench or have my mother stumble upon it while cleaning underneath the bed.

I'll let you know when it turns up.