cat toys – Page 2 – Pain In The Bud

How Do I Make My Cat Like Me?

A cat’s affection has to be earned, but the good news is it’s not rocket science. A little patience and consideration for your fluffy little pal goes a long way toward building trust and a strong bond. Once you do, you’ll have a loyal friend for life.

“How do I make my cat like me?”

That question comes up regularly on social media posts, in cat-centric discussion groups, Q&A sites and even in our inbox. People adopt a cat, and whether the little one dives under a bed and refuses to emerge, or just seems reluctant to snuggle the way people imagined, they turn to the internet to find out why they don’t have a purring, contented feline in their lap.

The short answer is you can’t “make” your cat feel anything, and it’s best to dispense with that notion as quickly as possible so you can acknowledge the truth: cats are individuals with their own thoughts and feelings.

The good news, however, is that you can earn your cat’s affection with patience, respect and love. Our patience and respect for our little buddies leads to trust, which in turn creates and strengthens the special bond we share with them.

The love of a cat isn’t as easily won as the love of a dog, and in many ways that makes it even more special. Cats don’t love just anyone.

It starts with acknowledging your cat has feelings, and understanding that you have to respect those feelings as you would those of a person.

Don’t make your cat do things she doesn’t want to do.

Despite what you might think or what you may have been told, most cats don’t like being picked up, held or feeling restricted. The majority of felines don’t like belly rubs, and people have a habit of mistaking a sign of trust — a cat showing her belly — as an invitation to pet.

Cat showing belly — A cat showing its belly is a sign of trust. It’s a vulnerable position for a cat, and not an invitation for belly rubs. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Every cat is different, but generally the best way to make sure your kitty doesn’t want to approach you is to ignore her personal boundaries and treat her like a stuffed animal.

Those “cute” videos you see on TikTok of terminally online people spinning their cats to Taylor Swift songs, holding them like phones to reenact scenes from The Princess Diaries, or forcing them to wear ridiculous outfits?

Don’t do that. It destroys your cat’s trust in you, and the cheap dopamine hit you get from strangers “liking” your content isn’t worth stressing your furry pal out and damaging your relationship.

Tik Tok cat abuse — Don’t do this. It’s not funny, the meme is lame and you’ll teach your cat to fear you. Credit: TikTok

If you tend to restrict your cat and hold her in your lap, you’re discouraging her from sitting there in the future. If you give kitty unnecessary baths, you could create a situation in which your cat fears you.

Even if you think you’re not doing anything wrong, if your cat is reluctant to approach you, there’s something that needs fixing, and it’ll require patience.

Don’t subject your cat to forced petting sessions.

Unlike dogs, cats have a limited tolerance for physical affection, and they don’t always want to be touched.

Your pal will be much more likely to regularly approach you for physical affection if you let him come to you. Ignore the impulse to reach out and start petting him like you would a dog. Instead, put your hand out and let your cat initiate the petting. You’ll develop a physical shorthand in which he signals he wants chin scratches or head rubs by leaning in and rubbing his face against your outstretched hand.

All felines have scent glands in their cheeks, and the initial contact of a cat rubbing his cheek against your fingers is an olfactory signal that says “This human is my family. I like this human.”

Even though our noses can’t detect those pheromones, they’re still important to our cat(s), and they’re the reason why cats will scent-mark objects by brushing past them in your home, just like tigers will mark their territories by scent-marking trees with urine. Same concept, but thankfully our miniature house tigers generally don’t feel the need to do the latter. (If yours does, take him to the vet. If he’s not “fixed,” get it done ASAP.)

Less is more when it comes to petting

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “I just don’t get it! I was petting my cat and she was purring and loving it, then without warning she bit me!”

Pro tip: A bite like that never comes without warning, it’s just that most of us don’t see the signs right in front of us.

Cats communicate by tail and whisker, and we communicate by making noises with our mouths. Adult cats don’t meow to each other. The little ones are smart enough to understand how we exchange information, so meows, trills, chirps and grunts are their way of trying to speak our language, to communicate on our terms.

But sometimes — like, say, when they’re purring and relaxed — they’re distracted and forget to meow, or they meow and we ignore them.

That’s when they bite, or swipe at us with their paws.

If you pay attention to non-verbal cues, you’ll notice your cat getting overstimulated when her tail starts swishing and her pupils dilate. If those signs aren’t enough, there are others: twitching ears, shifting positions, moving away.

The best way to avoid misunderstandings is to give kitty a few head rubs and chin scratches, then stop. If she wants more, she will let you know. If she doesn’t, she’ll be content to remain on your lap or by your side, knowing you’re not going to keep going indefinitely.

No harm, no foul, no bite.

Cat doesn't like hug — This cat is not enjoying selfie time with her human. Credit: imgur via Reddit

Don’t take your bad day out on your cat

Remember when you were a kid and your mom or dad came home from a bad day at work with a storm cloud hanging over their head? Maybe they snapped at you for apparently no reason, or made family dinner miserable with fraught silence. Maybe they unfairly got on your case about something minor.

Either way, the tension in the house was palpable because, as kids, your parents controlled your lives and you were dependent on them for everything.

That’s what it’s like for our pets. Whether we call ourselves “fur mommies” and “cat daddies” or not, the fact is that the pet-human dynamic absolutely shares some elements with the parent-child relationship.

Our pets are utterly dependent on us, they’re subject to our moods, and they’re deeply attuned to our emotions.

As a result, how we’re feeling has a big impact on them, for better and worse. Unlike children, who at least have some concept of redirected frustration, cats and dogs have no idea why we have bad moods and no way to insulate themselves from the consequences.

We’re all human and we all get frustrated with our feline friends at some point. If you’ve been sitting in traffic for three hours and come home to find Socks pooped all over the rug or threw up on your comforter, frustration is a natural response.

But for the sake of the innocent little ones we share our homes with, it’s up to us to be mindful of our moods and do our best not to let external factors impact how we treat our pets. Things as seemingly small as our tone of voice can have a major impact on their emotions.

Cat eating — A cat chowing down. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Don’t feed them crap

This has been covered exhaustively elsewhere, so we’ll direct you to catinfo.org if you have in-depth questions about feline nutrition.

In general, wet food should make up the majority of your cat’s diet. Cats don’t have a high thirst drive and they’ve evolved to get most of their hydration from meat, so a cat who eats mostly — or only — dry food is in danger of developing serious health problems.

Aside from that, more expensive doesn’t always mean better, and the important thing is that your cat’s food has real meat as the top ingredient. If the primary ingredient is a filler like corn or grain, or poultry/beef byproducts, steer clear and find a better alternative.

Feeding quality food means kitty will be happier, healthier, less prone to health complications and more active.

Keep things interesting

You don’t have to spend a lot of money on toys, and everyone who’s ever lived with a feline knows the fluffy little guys are just as likely to take a shine to a new box or the little plastic ring from a milk bottle as they are to the $10 new toy you bought from the pet store.

That said, there are certain toys that are almost universally beloved by felinekind, and the more you keep things interesting for your cat, the happier your furry overlord will be.

You can never go wrong with wands for interactive play. Keep it simple and manipulate the toy at the end of the wand like prey so your house panther can feel like a mighty hunter. Track toys with balls that cats can bat around are good for relatively quiet solo play. Cat tunnels are great too, especially if you toss treats inside them for kitty to find randomly.

Cat with toy mouse — A cat playing with a toy mouse. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

You don’t need a special occasion to surprise your little buddy with a catnip and play session, and you’d be surprised how enthralled felines can be by “cat TV” on Youtube. There are dozens of channels that provide hours-long videos of birds eating seeds from outdoor feeders, aquariums filled with interesting fish, and critters like squirrels and rodents.

You can also engage your cat by training her to do simple things like come when called, sit on command high five you. Those “tricks” are very easy to teach and require no more than two or three practice sessions a day, maximum 10 minutes each. Your cat will love it, especially with rewards for learning, and it’s fun to show skeptics that, yes, cats can do tricks just like dogs.

Sometimes “fun” is just something unusual, something your cat rarely gets to do or see. On occasion, I let Buddy walk up and down the hallway with me in my apartment building late at night when chances are low we’ll encounter anyone.

Gangnam style elevator — Elevators: products of foul sorcery that swallow humans and sometimes spit out Korean rappers.

He loves to stop at each door, listen and take in the strange sounds and scents. If anyone emerges from one of the doors or the elevator opens, he just makes haste back to our apartment, where I leave the door slightly ajar for that reason. As for the elevator, he seems to think it’s some sort of product of foul sorcery — it rumbles, the doors open by themselves, and when people walk in, they don’t walk out. Sometimes they enter only to emerge as a different person a few minutes later!

I’m happy to indulge his paranoia with regard to the elevator, because it means I don’t have to worry about curiosity getting the better of him.

If you’ve got rooms your cat doesn’t normally have access to, a yard with cat-proof fencing, or an activity you only do sometimes, consider breaking up your cat’s day with a little exploration or some ‘nip-fueled fun.

Portrait of the Buddies — “Extremely accurate portrait of the Buddies” commissioned by Buddy the Cat in 2024.

Treat your cat as a friend

Your cat may not have legal personhood, but he is a fully sentient being who feels emotions just as strongly as people do. Cats experience the full range of primary and secondary emotions, but not tertiary emotions. That means kitty can feel happy, sad, excited, anxious, jealous, bored, depressed and overjoyed, but she’s not going to be embarrassed if another cat’s wearing the same collar or fret over whether people and other cats like her.

The important thing is remembering cats have feelings.

It’s not rocket science, and it doesn’t cost us anything to treat our cats with respect, patience and love. Bonding with a cat requires more than just feeding, watering and scooping, but the effort is always worth it and you’ll have a loyal friend for life. Good luck!

Top image of incredibly sexy beast (Buddy) copyright Pain In The Bud.

How Do You Keep Your Cat Interested In Play Time?

The challenges of getting a lazy cat interested in play time and toys again.

Buddy is friendly, outgoing and incredibly vocal, but he’s always been a bit lazy.

His preferred method of getting down from the couch isn’t jumping — although he does jump sometimes — it’s slowly oozing off the cushion like he’s liquid, taking the path of least resistance and letting gravity do all the work until he drops down and lands with a “Mmmrrrrrppp!”

When we wake up, the first thing he does is demand a snack, then he lays down for First Nap, apparently because the act of chewing and swallowing is so demanding.

Brave Buddy — “Now’s an excellent time for a nap.”

While he used to chase the laser with a fury and jump several times his own height to paw at it — even after figuring out it’s light fired out of a pen held by me — nowadays he can’t be bothered. At best he halfheartedly chases it for a bit and then loses interest even though I make an effort to move the laser like prey, as I do with his wand toys.

Worst of all, catnip makes him even lazier because he doesn’t just sniff the damn stuff, he eats it. I try to get him interested in his favorite wand toy when he’s buzzing on a heady combination of ‘nip and silver vine, but he won’t chase it. He just rolls onto his back and paws at it lazily, maybe getting in a few “rabbit kicks” if he’s feeling feisty.

All of this would be funny if he wasn’t about to turn 10 years old and if he didn’t tip the scale at about a pound and a half to two pounds above his normal body weight when the vet weighed him a few months ago.

“Hey fat boy!” I tell him, getting the familiar “Brrrrrr!” in response. (He’s a big time triller. Feline linguists estimate at least 60 percent of the Buddinese dialect consists of trills of various pitch, length and intensity.)

Fat Boy lost most of the excess weight during a particularly brutal stretch when he screeched at me for snacks constantly and I had to deny him most of the time. At least with kids you can explain things to ’em. I’ve got no way of communicating to the Budster that he’s a Chubster.

Since then he’s put some of the weight back on, so I’ve gotta do something.

Here’s my plan:

Training him to do new tricks. He already knows come, stop, sit and high-five, so we’re gonna have to try something new, like teaching him to roll and maybe teaching him to jump on my shoulder and “ride” around with me. Training is mentally stimulating, it should be fun for him, and it lays the groundwork for more challenging tricks.
A cat obstacle course! I can rig something up with his tunnel, some boxes and some “hazards” that he must traverse in order to get his paws on some catnip.
Snacks dispensed via puzzle feeder only. None of that free-feeding when he gavones the stuff down like he’s starving.
Rotating toys. Admittedly I haven’t been very good about doing that. Almost every guide mentions rotating cat toys so your little buddies don’t get tired of them.
A mirror so he can see how ~~ripped~~ chubby he’s gotten. He really needs to see himself loafing. It’s not pretty.

Okay that last one is a joke, mostly because I’m pretty sure he’ll just admire his “meowscles” in the mirror. Cats are masters of self deception. Bud is scared of rustling paper bags and absolutely terrified of vacuums, yet he still thinks he’s a hulking tiger. That’s impressive cognitive dissonance.

Meatloafing Buddy — This is by far the fattest-looking photo of Buddy I could find. He’s in a super-meatloaf pose here, looking like a chonkmaster.

So we shall embark on this grand endeavor, and I’ll report back here to catalog successes and failures. Hopefully more of the former.

Buddy will always be like a baby to me, and I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that he’s now a “senior” cat, but he is and it’s on me to make sure he remains active so he hopefully lives at least another 10 years in good health. There are many adventures yet to be had, many more schemes for world domination to hatch, and more turkey to eat.

Is Giving ‘Nip To Your Cat The Equivalent Of Handing A Beer To A Toddler?

If cats are like small children emotionally and intellectually, is it ethical to give them a mind-altering drug?

That’s a question posed in a new article in The Conversation, and it’s something I’ve never really considered before.

It’s generally accepted that our little buddies are more or less equivalent to small children in terms of intellect and emotional intelligence. In fact kittens develop much more quickly than human children and come to certain understandings — like theory of mind and object permanence — considerably earlier than young kids do.

They also seem to possess some sapient qualities. My niece was born a year before Bud, for example, but in their early interactions he understood she was still developing motor skills and did not intend to cause him harm. I have photos of a young Buddy, still a kitten, cautiously allowing her to touch his fur and being uncharacteristically gentle with her.

There’s growing evidence that pet cats are “kittens in perpetuity.” Not only do their behaviors toward us mirror their behaviors toward their mothers — like meowing and using us as a “secure base” when faced with uncertainties — but they depend on us completely. We care for them, in turn, at least in part because they have neotenous (baby-like) features, which trigger our protective instincts.

Bud is basically a “kid,” so is it ethical for me to give him a potentially mind-altering substance?

Catnip isn’t really a drug

While some catnip companies lean into the whole “marijuana for cats” thing, naming catnip after famous marijuana strains, selling it in gag pharmaceutical bottles and even calling themselves “dispensaries,” those are marketing efforts aimed at us servants. As the authors note, it’s not accurate to consider catnip the equivalent of a drug.

It’s not physically addictive, its effects only last a few minutes and cats can’t overdose on the stuff. In fact the primary “danger” of giving too much catnip is your four-legged friend getting desensitized completely to the effect, which is why it’s an occasional treat, not a routine pick-me-up.

Meowijuana Catnip Company really leans into the whole “weed for cats” thing with catnip packaged like marijuana.

Catnip “won’t induce psychosis and won’t lead to addiction or withdrawal symptoms,” wrote authors Anne Quain, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Sydney, and Mia Cobb, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Animal Welfare Science center.

We don’t have to worry about cats driving on the stuff, and they have no responsibilities to speak of so catnip and silver vine can’t impact important decisions. If they have any deleterious social effects, they end at making our furry friends drool, look silly and rendering them even more drowsy than usual.

The mysteries of the nip effect

But what about a kitty’s subjective experience? How does catnip make your feline overlord feel?

We don’t have a very good answer to that question other than what we can observe, which is that they love the stuff. (Some cats don’t respond to catnip but are put in a state of bliss by silvervine. Some respond to both. A small number may not derive much pleasure from either of the plants.)

Even when they aren’t technically impacted by it, cats seem intrigued by the scent and use their secondary olfactory receptor, the vomeronasal organ, to do that odd-looking “mouth-sniffing” thing they do.

Buddy loves catnip and silver vine. I keep his ‘nip in an out-of-reach cabinet, inside a sealed container, which is itself inside an air-tight plastic bag. Bud can be in a deep sleep yet within seconds of opening it he’ll appear like an overly enthusiastic djinn who thinks the wish thing works in reverse, meowing impatiently and trilling with anticipation as I set the good stuff down for him.

That’s as close to consent as we’re going to get from cats, and I think we can safely conclude Bud’s response is “Hell yes! Gimme that sweet ‘nip and silver vine blend!”

He gobbles the stuff down, by the way, so YMMV on your feline overlord’s reaction. The conventional wisdom is that cats who sniff catnip get more animated while cats who eat it tend to roll around in bliss and meow.

Making life more interesting for your fuzzy liege lord

Which brings us to the final point: catnip and silver vine are ultimately enrichment tools that help make indoor life more exciting for our little buddies, like toys, cat furniture, boxes, intriguing smells and most importantly, time playing with us.

We don’t talk about it enough, but keeping our cats stimulated and happy indoors is important, especially as pressure mounts for everyone to keep their felines inside. If your local area isn’t enforcing curfews and outright bans, it seems only a matter of time before they follow states in Australia, New Zealand and Europe in passing new laws. Every day there are news articles detailing the efforts of city councils and town boards to deal with outdoor, unmanaged feline populations, and it’s a safe bet that most of those elected officials will not have the welfare of the animals high on their list of priorities.

If we want to avoid cruelty toward cats, getting our own pets comfortable with living indoors is a good first step to making sure government doesn’t become involved.

A happy cat with a huge stash of the good stuff.

Yes, It’s Safe For Your Feline Friend To Eat Catnip

It turns out catnip has a different effect when cats eat it instead of sniffing and rolling around in it.

Is it safe for a cat to eat catnip, and does eating it instead of sniffing it make any difference to the kitty?

I wondered about that while watching Buddy enthusiastically lap up some silver vine and ‘nip yesterday afternoon before he drifted off to nirvana.

If you’re worried about whether it’s safe, don’t be. While most cats tend to sniff or roll around in the stuff, there’s nothing in catnip that can harm them according to veterinarians.

The worst that can happen is a mild stomach ache from eating too much of the good stuff.

As for whether ingesting vs sniffing makes any difference, it turns out it does.

When catnip hits the olfactory receptors, it works as a stimulant, prompting energetic, playful behavior.

But when it’s ingested, catnip has the opposite effect, working as a sedative. Felines who eat the ‘nip become more relaxed, often drooling or drifting off for a nap.

Buddy on catnip — “I think…I’m pretty sure I’m feeling it. Oh yeah! Break out the laser pointer and the snacks!”

That makes perfect sense given my own observations. As a feline who eats catnip, Bud will still play, but he’s lazy about it. Instead of ambushing and tackling his wand toys he’ll just pad up to them, drop to the floor and lazily paw at the plush toys at the end of the string, occasionally biting or rabbit-kicking them.

When all else fails, the laser gets him moving.

Regardless of whether your cat sniffs or eats the good stuff, the effects are relatively short-lived and wear off after about 15 minutes.

Catnip is safe for your furry friends and it’s a great way to help make an indoor cat’s life more exciting.

Who Has A Box? I Has A Box!

A new box arrived today from Amazon, the company that sends boxes!

I have a new box. Didn’t know if you knew that. Yeah, it’s awesome! It’s square, and made of cardboard, and you can sits in it.

After Big Buddy removed the irrelevant item inside — something that came in its own smaller box, which shall be investigated at a later time — I inspected the box from the inside and outside to make sure it was suitable.

Sure enough it turned out to be a good box, so I sat in it! Isn’t that awesome?

Who doesn’t love boxes? They’re so…boxy. You can sits in them. When you’re inside a box, you can see humans, but humans can’t see you. Also, boxes are cozy.

I have a new box!