Cat Toy

Today I was in PetSmart looking for a toy for LuLu.

Do you know how many cat toys are shaped like mice? A lot. Tons of little gray life-like mice made out of felt, filled with cat nip. They also sell a wide assortment of bigger,very life-like mice, which verge on being rats. Some have squeekers, which is disgusting.

I can’t do mice, even if they are cat toys. I am so afraid of mice. They give me the willies. My mouse aversion verges on the phobic. When I was a kid, a few months after my father died, I heard a scritching noise from my closet one night. When I told my mother about it in the morning she said it was probably a mouse, and she set a trap.

The next day we checked, and sure enough there was a mouse in the trap but it wasn’t dead. It was still moving around. My mother freaked out. She armed herself with oven mitts and one of my dead father’s shoes that was fitted with lifts because he was short. We called them his “elevator shoes.” They were big and black and heavy as hell.

My mother picked up the trap in her mitted hands, and with the still live mouse dangling from it, she marched it to the bathroom, put it down on the porcelain tiled floor, and proceeded to bludgeon it to death with the elevator shoe.

When it was dead, she collapsed on that bathroom floor and wept. I don’t know if she was crying for the mouse, or because she was holding my father’s shoe, or because it suddenly hit her that she was alone and from now on she would be the one who would have to slay all the mice.
So instead of a mouse, I bought LuLu a bird. Not really a bird, but a thing that has bird components: feathers, mainly, oh, and it chirps when you wobble it.

I love birds, and I don’t like it at all that I am baiting my cat with this bird-like thing, encouraging her to pounce and shred and de-feather them, but since she’s an indoor cat, the real birds are safe.
I never thought about what the dog would think about this thing when I bought it. When Boomer heard it, she wanted AT IT. So now I can’t even give it to LuLu because Boomer will pounce on it and chew it to shreds.
I tried.