Conference misery::feline_v1

My Siamese has many of the same habits as your cat, so I think they are both 
normal. (She doesn't like the freezer though, its MUCH too cold!!) I have 
heard of other cats liking to get into the refrigerator, so it isn't unheard 
of.

	/s/	Bob

Welp, Sammy, my maine coon, LOVES straws.  He has catnip mouses
balls, chew toys, but NO, he has to play with a STRAW.  good
ludes.   I went to Macy D's last night, got a large coke, was
lying on the couch, look down to find my drink, and hes sitting
there with the straw in his mouth (It was still in the drink) 
If only I had my camera!!  What a commecial for Macy D's! 

He also has the habit of sliding along the bottom of the couch,
one paw underneath the couch, the other on the side,.. he lays
on his side, and slides around the couch, a full speed (warp 10)
on his side.  You have to see it to believe it!! 

I scared the *beep* out of him this morning, he was sitting on
the window sill so I snuck up behind him and tapped his sides
Wow, he REALLY jumped, he was hanging off the screen!!  

Sammy has a hair fetish too.  He'll sit on the top of the back
of the couch, and put his paws in your hair, run his nose thru
it, and chew on it.  

Hes really into alot of strange things.  Kind of a psyched
cat if you ask me..
					/robin

I think cats are like kids, every one different.

Bit's favorite toy is her tail.  She will chase it for up to an hour at
a time.  However, if you make it known to her that you are watching, she
will commence cleaning her tail to show that she really isn't playful
at all.

Julliette's favorite toy is either of the other cats.  She loves to hide
and attack, then walk away unperturbed.  She also loves to sleep under 
the covers on any of our beds, even when someone else is in it.

Stanley's favorite toy is a plastic tie, like those used to hold bread
bags together.  He also loves boxes.  Any time there is an empty box
around, he will jump in and curl up.

Actually, I think eccentric is NORMAL for cats!!

ellen

   Agree that eccentric is normal.  Every one of the practices mentioned here
are espoused by one or more of my cats.  Pip sits on the bathroom window sill
behind me in the morning and "helps" me with my hair.  He loves grooming me.
HE will also dry me off when I get out of the shower.  (I usually can't take
too much of that.  A cat licking your ankles tickles!!)  All the cats love 
running water.  Pip likes to lick soap suds out of the tub.  Sammy *loves* 
pop bottle tops.  I have to hide them from him.  He's very good at finding them
(and making noise with them at 3 am.).  Merry loves twigs of the size that use
for kindling for the fireplace.  He'll bat them around on the hardwood den 
floor and lay his frontpaws down on the twig and keep running with his back 
legs.  About 3 of them scoot along the couch as previously described.  Gandalf
loves ice cubes!  If you get an ice cube tray out of the fridge, he will climb
up your leg until you put one in his water bowl.  Than he'll sit and stare at 
it till it melts.  They all *love* bugs.  (Which is fine with me.  The more 
tha eat, the fewer about to bother me.)  3 of them like the fridge.  One was
actually shut in there once for about 5 minutes by mistake.(I think it was Pip.)
Cinnamon and Pip are fascinated with my electric razor.  When I shave my legs,
I have an attentive audience.  They sit and watch and if hold the razor away 
from my leg for them to smell, they sit there and smackt he hell out of it 
until it is turned off (sometimes they keep going for a minute or two after it'
turned off). They love boxes of any kind.  If they can't get into them, they'll
sit on top of them.  It seem that they get joy out of playing with anything.
A recurring statement at my house is "everything is a toy or food or a bed."
They also enjoy playing with one another.  (Although with the recent change in
housing things have been a little too tense for playful chasing.)  ( although
things are much better and are slipping back to the point that they will play
for a few minutes before they come to their sense and realize what they are 
doing.  Oh my God! I'm playing with one of them!!)
 
  I also subscribe to the spoil'em rotten school of upbringing.  There are very
few places or things that are forbidden.  The kitchen counter is one.  If there
is anything we don't want them to get into, we put it in the closet or the 
sewing room and close the door.  Other than that they have free reign.

tlh

At least most cats wait for you to open the freezer. One morning I walked
into the kitchen to find my pair had discovered the fine art of opening
the freezer door to get the hamburger stored within! A half day of being
banished to the rear of the apartment showed them how displeased this made
me, and they've never tried again.

My local pet store (Breeders' Pride in Sudbury, Ma) has these little
foam rubber soccer balls.  Einstein goes crazy over them.  He bats one
for awhile and it will stick to his claw.  He tries to get it off his
claw by waving his paw wildly.  Finally it shoots about 10 feet straight
up and Einstein bounds happily after it.  He is great fun to watch.
Einstein will play with anything.  He also steals clothes.  As I've
mentioned a few other places in this file, Einstein thinks it is just
grand to bite me in the nose to get some attention.  First he uses
a gentle nip.  If I ignore him, he has developed the habit of
repeatedly nipping my nose sharply.  I am trying to break him of this
habit.  It hurts like crazy.  All the while, Einstein purrs.

Tigger has lost her sense of humor.  She doesn't like Einstein.
I'll have to let you know how she plays when she gets over her 
depression.

Of course, a flashlight beam in a dark room is pretty standard, and lots of 
fun if your cats haven't tried it.  If they're bored with the flashlight 
already (or they've figured it out), bring home one of those extremely 
low-powered helium-neon lasers.  Our cats went bananas.  They reacted much as 
they do to a flying insect, and the laser beam is more controllable than 
an insect. (We also beamed it onto the wall of the apartment building across the
street, and convinced some little kids that they were being visited by E. T.) 

Val & Jon

Ranger and Shadow, my two youngest, love video games.  I have a large
25" TV with a screen that is close to the floor.  They go crazy trying
to catch the characters on the screen.  Strangely enough, they don't
respond with any interest to regular TV (everyone's a critic) but as
soon as they hear the video games they race to the TV.

Kismet, my Siamese, likes to play with Ranger and Shadow (she's convinced
she's their mother)...she doesn't much care for toys.  She does, however,
like to chase your feet when they are under the covers.  This is fine in
the winter, but can be painful in the summer when there are few covers on
the bed!

Hobbit, my old Maine Coon, is much too regal and dignified to play...although
sometimes I do catch him batting a bottle cap or twist tie around the kitchen
floor.  Whenever I catch him at it, he looks terribly embarrassed.

Being that they're cats, almost anything can become a toy.  You never know
what's going to strike their fancy next!

-nn

My cat's favorite sort of fun is catching anything in the yard (and some-
times in the house!) like birds, squirrels, moles, frogs, snakes, you name
it!  His favorite is birds.  

Re:1 - I died when you said your cat "kicks the water dish around the house".
       My cat will NOT drink out of his water dish, ONLY the dog's water dish.
       And at that, when you try to put his food dish on the floor with fresh
       food, he will step on the corner of it and make the dry food go flying
       all over the floor, then eat it.  He sleeps where ever he wants, except
       "in Dad's chair" (I can't even sit there!)  

Nichole

Aside from throwing himself in front of cars, Chiun's favorite games
include chewing on a string (two shoelaces tied together) and lying
under the sheets when I make the bed. (OK, so he's not exactly the
Evel Knieval (sp?) of catdom.) He'll chase the string, but as soon
as he catches it he hunkers down and chews blissfully on it. Since the
string tends to get shorter and shorter, as more and more of it winds
up inside the cat, I have to tug on it now and then to keep him from
eating the whole thing.

Several of my cats, past and present, show a fondness for the bed trick.
When they hear the sound of sheets flapping, they come running and leap
onto the bare mattress, then lie there waiting for the sheet to drift
down on top of them. Once the sheet is tucked in, they roll onto their
backs, all four feet pressing against the sheet, and play tag with
my fingers.

I used to have a pair of cats, Amanda and Princess, who made up a game
of their own. We had a wooden spool of some kind, about two feet long
and ten or twelve inches in diameter, with a hole down the center. We
would lay this on its side and put an aluminum bottle cap at one end.
The cats would sit at either end of the tube and the one nearest the
cap would poke at it, batting it to the other end of the tube; then
the second cat would "return serve". They could keep this up for quite
a while, but eventually someone would hit it too hard and it would fall
out the far side.

Abigail likes paper sacks. Little Black One, a black half-Siamese that
my parents had, LOVED pipecleaners; she would retrieve them for hours
just to get people to throw them again. Her favorite spot was at the
entrance to the hall; she could skid on the linoleum and crash into
the bedroom door at the end with a satisfying thud. Many times I
awakened in the morning to find her sitting on my bed, chirping at me;
I would grope around a bit and sure enough, a rather damp pipecleaner
was usually lying very near my face.

-b

What?  No cat Noters?

Jim Stratton

I'm not sure if this is really a 'game cat's play', but it was a game at the
time.

A friend called round to the house one evening on his way home from the local
swimming baths. We were sitting there making polite conversation when WINSTON
SPENCER CHURCHILL RASAMATAS (I like cats with short names) entered the room.
He made straight for my friend and started to lick and nibble his face and neck.This lasted for some time with my friend trying to ignore what was happening.

Eventually the cat had to be removed from the room.

The only reason I can put forward to explain this very unusual bahaviour is the
Chlorine in the water at the swimming baths. Any other ideas?????..


Tis.

	Well, our little tigress, Koshka, likes to wake Jim up by
standing on his throat (one paw at a time, in the most sensitive spot)
and chewing on his beard.  Our black longhaired monster, Chorniy, has
a thing about the toilet.  He will come from across the house to watch
it flush and he has to be restrained from "helping" us when we're using
it.  What would Freud say?  Koshka isn't as interested in it, ever since
she fell in.

	Other favorite games center around a 6' wooden stepladder, which
has been in the living room for a month while we're painting the house.
We don't have the heart to put it away.  Chorniy and Koshka live on it.
They like to come booking down the hall, leap onto the arm-chair, leap
to a middle step of the ladder and race to the top.  One of Chorniy's
favorite tricks is to be sitting on the paint-can shelf on the ladder,
look down from one side of his perch, and discover that, by golly, this
big long bushy black thing followed him up there and it's hanging off
of the other side! This is followed by a contortion/balance act where
he tries to catch the enemy and ends up wrapped completely around the
ladder hanging onto his tail!  Jim and I are usually on the floor in
hysterics by this point.

	The cats also LOVE grocery day because of the bags.  They scoot
them all around the kitchen.  One will get inside a bag, and the other
will pounce on top and not let him/her out.  Another favorite toy is
the plastic thing that comes on top of 6-pack coke cans, which Koshka
carries around the house.  She also likes acorns, and carries them
around, burying them squirrel-fashion in the couch cushions.

	I should mention that the Koshka and Chorniy are around 3-4
months old right now, but weigh 4 and 5 pounds respectively.  Our vet
keeps asking us what we're feeding them....they're going to be big
kitties.

A new trick for Chorniy and Koshka:  When I re-make the bed they like to
attack the sheets as I'm taking them off.  Ever try to remove a sheet
that has a 5-lb weight attached to it?  Then they lie in wait on the bed
for me to put the new sheets on and latch into them as they float down.
It makes it a *little* harder to get the sheets straight!  When I'm done
making the bed there's usually at least one cat-sized lump still under
the covers.  This leads to a game of pounce, with one cat under and one
over the covers.  Ahhh, life with kitties!

All the things mentioned so far seem like normal cat activities. On the
other hand, my sister's cat Tadaka is really INSANE!  His games include:

1) Eating panty hose.
2) "Adopdting" small stuffed toys, of the sort normal cats like to play with
	and beat up on. Tadaka's toys (a stuffed tiger, teddy bear <ala Pookie>
	and rabbit) get carried around the house like kittens. The are brought
	around the food dish to eat, and are even lined up in front of the cat
	box at regular intervals.  I accidently stepped on the tiger one day,
	and was attacked by Tadaka - it took two years to make friends again.
3) Knocking over table lamps.
4) Pulling the laces out of shoes, then eating them.
5) Watching the water swirl down the toilet bowl. This was almost the end of
	the cat when it was a little kitten - he fell in and my sister says
	she barely caught him by the tail.
6) Finally, and I did not belive this until I saw it myself, If given a chance
	Tadaka will sit on my sister's head!

Of my cats:
	Morgan liked to hide in sacks, chew Jack-O-Lantern stems, run off with
	any electronic components I happened to be working with, and chase
	his tail.

	Mianinne used to try to catch images on the TV screen.

	Angelica adopted a toy stuffed tiger.

	Merlin likes to knock over water bowls; or if these are untippable,
	drop things in the water.  He's also good at opening doors -- regular
	as well as cabinet.

	Vivianne likes to find recording tape and eat it (I have to be VERY
	careful.  She also likes to "stand guard" whe someone's taking a 
	shower.

	Karamaneh likes to burrow under dropcloths.

	Morlock likes to "fight" with a captain's chair.

	And my step-cat, Sammy, likes to sit on his hind legs and "pray" for
	favors.  He also is a tail-chaser.

Steve

Oscar Gordon II likes to "kill" a large blue puffball that I got as a bow on 
a birthday present.  He bats it around for few minutes, then lets out the 
distinctive mrrreoooow of a cat that has brought you something from the back
yard, and carries the puffball to you.  He gets decidedly miffed if you don't
praise him and play with the ball yourself for a while.  I'll have to admit 
it's better than having to play with a dead mole, though.

- Chris

My Harold loves to wrap himself around my neck and fall asleep.  Not
much of a game, I suppose, but his idea of fun..

Tom

Tiff, our Siamese is a gentle loving soul - most of the time - but
let a strange man (like the washer repairman) - or the poor UPS guy
show up and Tiff LOVES to terrorize them.

About a year ago the washer repairman had my washer pulled out from
the wall and he had climbed behind to do some repairs - he was completely
boxed in.  I heard this masculine plead "Mrs. Chapman - oh Mrs. Chapman"
and I ran downstairs.  There stood Tiff on his hind legs hissing and 
waving his front paws with claws unsheathed.  I looked at Tiff and
started laughing - he promptly went down on all four feet and looked
like an angel.

Tiff (a male) seems to only do this to men that come to the house that
aren't friends.  Guests are treated ok.

Kismet, my Siamese, is just the opposite. She LOVES men. A couple 
of weeks ago, the TV repairman arrived and she absolutely refused 
to let the poor man alone. He got the full treatment: loud purrs 
punctuated with Siamese chirps, rubbing, arm nudging, and 
repeated attempts (some were successful) to climb into the poor 
man's lap! It's a good thing he liked cats! In the interest of 
getting my set repaired, I finally had to pick her up and hold 
her.

And they say cats don't have personalities!

-nn  

 This is a little late, but I'll put it in anyway.  

  Years ago my mother had a pair of siamese cats 'noi' and 'doi' (roughly
  adapted from Chinese, meaning 'little girl' and 'little boy').

  The male dominated and taught the female to play a game with a shirt box
  where the female was maneuvered into the open box and patted down into it.
  The male then closed down the four flaps and sat on the closed box for
  several minutes until the female protested.  He would let her out and
  proceed to start the game all over again. 

  This would sometimes be performed in front of visitors, who responded with
  gales of laughter.  It was especially hilarious when the female delibrately
  pushed her tail out through the closed flaps, and the male responded by
  tucking the tail back in with one paw while holding the box flaps down
  with the other.

  Somewhere in previous replies to this note someone might have metioned
  what I consider to be the paramount cat game, but I must have missed it:

     * CHASE THE STRING *

  It takes some skill development to pull the string away just as the cat
  pounces, but your cat will willingly comply in helping you practice.
  As your reflexes develop, the pleasure your cat derives from the game
  increases.  The same male siamese I mentioned above loved the game so
  much he would bring the string to me signaling when he was ready to play.

  I now have three orange ('Morris') cats and my kids have taken over the
  string-pulling duties.

  Neil


   

RE: .21

My mother had a cat that loved to play chase the string so much that he
learned how to open the drawer where his string was kept so he could let
her know when he wanted to play.

-Mary

    My Souche's favorite play thing in the world is a piece of paper
    crumpled up into a ball of sorts.  When my children were younger
    and doing homework, if they crumpled up a piece of homework to throw
    away, she would retreive it out of the baseket and play with it
    by knocking it around the house and picking it up and carrying it
    as if it were a kitten.  This paper could be anything.  One morning
    I was checking to see how much money I had for the day and a $5
    bill had fallen on the floor without me knowing.  A few minutes
    later I saw Souche running through the kitchen toward the dining
    room with a green piece of paper in her mouth.  I didn't realize
    for a few moments what the GREEN paper actually was.  We have learned
    not to leave any improtant pieces of paper around anywhere or it
    will be carried off by the paper bandit.

I have 2 siamese cats, a male named Nikki and a female named Girl (we never
thought up a name that matched her slightly neurotic personality so Girl
stuck).  Anyway, their favorite games to play together are chasing each other
everywhere, grooming each other, and just being plain lazy.  Each has it's own
particular fetish when it comes to entertainment.  Nikki loves to chew
anything that remotely resembles string, and will keep munching until there is
nothing left if you don't catch him at it before that.  He also likes to lick
wood, and has tried all the cabinets in the kitchen, the refrigerator, stove,
dishwasher and baseboards.  Now he is into the furniture in the living and
dining rooms. Strange. 

Girl likes to chew strings also, but her favorite thing is crinkly plastic 
bags.  She comes from anywhere in the house when she hears one, and hangs 
around hoping that you will forget and leave it where she can get to it.  She 
will get down and chew-chew-chew in perfect estacy until one of us comes
to take it away before it does any damage to her system.  She knows that she 
shouldn't chew them.  You don't have to sneak up on her to take it away - she 
doesn't hear you coming she gets into it so much.... Another one of her 
favorite things to do is hide when she knows that you want her (like when you
call her).  She will not make a noise, and she hides well.  The only thing 
that will get her running are plastic bags and anything that sounds like 
either Pounce or Bonkers........Which of course will bring Nikki running too!


Lidna

    We have two kittens, Finbar, a black and white male, and Matilda
    (Tilly), a female who is chocolate brown with ginger flecks.  

    Finbar's favourite toys tend to be animate; he likes tails, his own or 
    Tilly's, he's not fussy, and my feet under the duvet in the morning.
    
    Tilly's absolute favourite toy is a rubber eraser, which I keep
    finding under the settee, behind the fridge, under my pillow....
    She also goes wild for the rubber bands I tie my hair back with.
    She knows the box I keep them in, and has worked out how to prise
    the lid off.  So, as far as she's concerned that is her toy box!
    
    Tilly is also very fond of playing with food, which we try to
    discourage, because it is naturally very messy!  However she was
    at her most amusing when, after we'd had an Indian takeaway, she
    found an uneaten chapati, and ran round the house trying to kill
    it.
    
    Ali

    Careful of those rubber bands;  I believe they can cause intestinal
    obstructions or worse.
    

    My children like alot of the same things, to include, gumbands,
    hazelnuts, peanut m&ms, the plastic tab from milk, yarn, shoe laces,
    boxes, bags, and the bed covers.
    
    About the gum bands, I just took Kali (1 year old Calico), to the
    vet last night because she kept vomiting.  The vet suspects that
    is fur balls but he said it could be string or GUMBANDS that she
    swallowed.  I just glared at my husband because I always seem to
    have gumbands on my wrist when I come home from work and then my
    husband shoots them at the cats who then play with them and eventually
    eats them.
    
    Another story about Kali happened a few weeks ago.  I had all the
    Christmas presents in the extra bedroom all boxed but not wrapped.
    I picked up a stack of boxes to start wrapping and took them in
    the living room.  I went to wrap a box of towels for a sister in
    Minnesota and I thought it was a little heavy and I look in and
    there is Kali laying on the towels, just think she could be a dead
    kitty in Minnesota.  My sister would have thought I didn't like
    her!!
    
    Barbara
    

    This is probably in here somewhere but I'll say it here just
    in case it isn't.  Contrary to the wonderful stereotype of
    kittens playing with yarn, yarn and string are NOT good cat-
    toys.  Some cats eat yarn or string or thread and it can become
    tangled in their intestines.  That will usually require
    surgery and can be fatal!  That would also include things like
    gumbands, which I assume means elastic bands.  I have never heard
    the term, but from the description I think that's what it means.
      So be careful with what you leave out for the kitties to play
    with.
      Nancy DC
    

    The form feed hides a true story that is not for the squeemish:
    
    
    
     Maxwell, our male cat, loves to eat string, ribbon and rubber bands.
    This is a very bad habit and we try our best to preclude him from
    ingesting these hazardous objects. Every now and then he manages
    to find some trouble to get into and it becomes a pain in the butt
    (both mine and his) to get him out of it (or is it out of him?).
    
     Max had eaten a 2 foot long piece of string. As his body processed
    it, it began to hang out of his behind. Being unused to such a
    sensation, Dear old Maxwell decided to try to get rid of the string
    by dragging his buttocks on the carpet. Since this didn't work,
    he began to run about the house with this "thing" chasing him all
    of the way. No one had noticed why he was acting so strange until
    I went down to get another beer. (We were getting ready to go out
    and I was already dressed up). I noticed a strange shadow on the
    wall. I turned on the light and noticed the shadow had more solidity
    than usual, as well as a slightly malodorous scent.
    
    As I started to clean up, I noticed more and more. Then I saw Max
    hiding under the chair, panting from the exertion, with the string
    following behind him. I apprehended the villain, and proceeded to
    try to remove the offending string from the cat. Some of it came
    out easily, but soon I was met with tension. I cut the string off
    there, so it wouldn't bother him. About 15 minutes later, he defecated
    the remainder of the string. I was sure glad when that was over.
    Nasty mess!
    
    The Doctah

    I had gone through all the stories and found the Maxwell one 
    most entertaining.  My cat's name is also Maxwell, so possibly
    I could relate more to the story.  Fortunately, my Max has never
    encountered eating string.
    
    Maxwell plays with much the same stuff as other cats, but his best
    trick is to give kitty kisses.  If we say "give me a kiss" or just
    make a kiss sound, Max will lick our nose.  He even gives command
    performances for guests.
    
    One of his bad habits is to wake us up at about 5:00am to either
    feed him or let him out.  Max finds a piece of paper or plastic
    on the floor and kneads it until we wake up and yell at him.  He
    then stops for about 5 minutes (allows us time to get up), and if
    we don't respond, he starts up again.
    
    

    Ralph, my 1 year old Tiger cat *loves* to watch hockey on the TV with
    my husband.  Ralph sits right in front of the TV and tries to catch
    the puck.  He does this so attententively it truly amazes me.  He
    will be mesmerized with this game for hours.
    
    After all, what should I expect - he's a male too and don't 98%
    of them love sports!

    
    
    	Squeek and Sara have a new game - it's called `how to get
    	mom up on the weekends'. They both jump up onto the water
    	bed headboard, then take turns LEAPing onto the middle of
    	the bed - SPLAT!  :P
    

>    	Squeek and Sara have a new game - it's called `how to get
>    	mom up on the weekends'. They both jump up onto the water
>    	bed headboard, then take turns LEAPing onto the middle of
>    	the bed - SPLAT!  :P
    
Sam and Hannah call this "EARTHQUAKE!!!" and use it to get me up
in the middle of the night if the weather is nice and they aren't
sleepy.....sometimes it still works.  However, one side effect is
that I slept through the last few quakes that hit at night - I'm
now immune.  8^}