How to play with your cat

I’m going to give you some ideas and techniques for how you can play with your cat. Simple is often better. So here, we’ve got a rolled up piece of paper. You might have noticed cats will love to play with paper. They like to bat things about. It’s cheap, it’s effective, it’s safe. If she chews a paper or cardboard, it’s going to mush up inside. She should be able to pass it fine. So no risk to the animal, cheap, cheerful, effective. My cat loves to play with toilet rolls. So if we leave a toilet roll out, he will have a good chew at it. He’s more like a dog than a cat, you might say, but a lot of cats will enjoy this, too. A bit messy, but again, nice, safe, cheap. We all have them around the house.

There’s lots of commercial toys out here, too. Some of these will contain little pouches. You can pop some cat nip inside. Again, same concept, they can bat them about, they can play with them. Just gives them something to occupy themselves and their time, particularly when you’re not around.

Play is super important for a cat. They need to be able to express their natural behaviors when they’re at home. We’re putting them in this artificial environment. They’re meant to be out in the wild typically, or traditionally, they’re out in the wild. They’d be hunting for food, they’d be searching for food. Now, we’re giving it to them on a plate. So play feeders, things where they have to forage for their food encourages that natural hunting behavior, that natural instinct to dig and search for food.

Batting these about stimulates being some prey, where they would play with their food. If you’ve seen cats catch prey, they’ll often play with it extensively before they actually eat it. So it just gives them that mental stimulation that they need. It also gives them a bit of exercise, particularly for our indoor-only animals, it gives them a bit of exercise that they otherwise wouldn’t be getting.

Here, we have some catnip. So Dotty’s pretty settled right now. She’s having a nice groom, but catnip can be a way to invigorate them a little bit, give them something to entice them into playing with specific treats. Hey, Dotty, what’s this?

So catnip has a bit of scent to it, but it’s not typically bad. Some cats will eat it. It’s not going to do them any harm if they do. Some of them will roll around in it. If nothing else, it just, in some cases, will make them more excited to play with the toy or more enticed to play with the toy. They’ll roll around. You’d get some great videos of them, post them on your social media. It’s just a great way to get cats interested in what you’re wanting them to play with.

Other ways we can do this is food. If your cat is food-motivated, a lot of them are, then we can hide little bits of food. So I’d recommend just, when you feed them, one of the times a day that you feed them, you can just wrap up some of that kibble, if you’re using dry food, in bits of paper or paper towel or little cloth wraps that they have to dig through to find their food. That, again, just gives them that bit of mental stimulation, that foraging behavior, that searching for food, which makes it a little bit more interesting, also help to keep them busy when you’re outside of the house, so you’re not there to physically play with them.

Of course, if you are in the house, you can use [inaudible 00:03:14] toys. You can play with these toys with them. You can give them something to think about. I’d always recommend that there’s a reward at the end of it. We don’t recommend using laser pointers because the cats can get quite frustrated. So if you are using a laser pointer, if your cat does really enjoy that, then I’d just always recommend that there’s a reward at the end of it, something they can chew on and play with, so they get that physical reward, which finishes that play experience nicely for them. Their attention span’s quite short, so less than two minutes is optimal, just short, little stints of play. When they opt out, they opt out. That’s fine. We come back to it in a few hours time and we go again. It’s part of the joy of having a cat.