What can get your happy train back on track more quickly than a cat-toy-making party? Invite a little feline to test the toys out, and your jollies will know no bounds.
On Sunday, June 11, Long Beach Animal Care Services’ (ACS) Enrichment Coordinator, Kathy Roddy, gathered some of us kitty-cuddling volunteers to create playthings for the shelter’s cats to keep them interested, engaged and silly instead of lying around in their kennels bored silly. Playing with toys helps exercise and socialize the cats and increases their chances of adoption.
“Oh, won’t they love this!” Volunteer Lissette Martinez gets her inner kitty on with pipe cleaners! Photos by Kate Karp.
Inspired by Beatles music and the thoughts of the little moggies, the volunteers got creative with pipe cleaners, feathers, toilet-paper-roll cores (Don’t throw those away! The shelter needs them!), wine corks (they’d been soaked in water to prevent unintended inebriation) and jars of catnip (which induces feline inebriation in the best way possible). Roddy soon decided that it would be a good idea to have a cat try the toys out, so she plopped a tiny kitten on the table. Oh, the oohs, the aaahhs and the aaawwes, and the playthings passed all tests with flying colors—literal flying colors, everywhere.
Shelter enrichment coordinator (left) and volunteer Heather Williams are enchanted with the little kittengartener.
“I am wants biggest catnip blunt inna world.”
“Holy cats, I iz baked!”
We were suggesting toy manufacturing companies that would welcome a cat in as a toy tester—Catsbro, Fishy-Price and Cat-tel came to mind—and during the conversation, we decided that Mattel would be a good name for the kitten. He couldn’t have cared less if we called him Englebert Humperdink—he had food, a litter box and a lot of new friends to cuddle him, whom he welcomed with rumbling appreciation, and he was in full toy overload.
Mattel showing appreciation of the new toys, with Roddy and ACO Vyktoria Cunningham, who also found him irresistible.
I couldn’t wait to post this because I figured that readers would rush in to adopt Mattel, but I was told yesterday that someone beat me to it. Well, good! And there are plenty more left.
If you’d like to donate some raw materials for the toys, the shelter is in constant need of stuff for cat and dog enrichment, for example:
- Dogs: plain yogurt, ice-cube trays, treats, cans of beef and chicken broth, canned pumpkin, apples and peanut butter
- Cats: catnip, feathers, pom-poms, fabric, yarn, bubble mix
- Both: wind chimes and natural lavender and peppermint oils for calmness
See a full list here.
And if you have any creative ideas for toys or goodies for both dogs and cats, email them to [email protected].
Do come to the shelter and check out the cats at play—7700 East Spring Street in Long Beach, at the entrance to El Dorado Park. No fee for shelter visitors.
Quite a haul!
“In a cat’s eye, all things belong to cats.”
~ English proverb