I have four cats. Three of them are 23 years old, and the youngest is 12. Two of the older cats are sisters from the same litter. They are playful with me, but they quickly lose interest in playing with toys. The other 23 year-old (Bird) is a couple of months younger than the sisters. I began feeding her as a feral cat when she was probably a couple of months old, after her mom and all but one of her siblings were killed by dogs. Her mom had had her litter in the porch of a vacant house next to one of our ambulance stations (I owned an ambulance company then). When they heard the dogs, a couple of my paramedics went out and rescued the two remaining kittens. As I had four cats at home at that time, I didn't feel like I could take in two additional feral kittens. Instead, I boarded up the porch so that dogs couldn't get in there, made them a bed of ambulance sheets, which I replaced periodically, and fed them twice a day. Once they got old enough to eat regular food, I'd leave cat food for them but they would come out to beg whenever any of our medics were barbecuing or when the neighbor on the other side of our station was cleaning fish. Her sister was killed by a car, or possibly even one of our ambulances, in front of the station, when she was about a year old, so Bird became the station cat, although she was still about half feral. Through all of this, she never lost her playfulness, though. When she found something she considered to be a toy, she would howl for other stray cats in the neighborhood to come play, and a few of them would generally respond. The funny thing is that when she finished playing, she would stash her toys away somewhere. Over the years, I got married and we decided to move from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to Maine. After selling my interest in the ambulance company to my partner, we found a place in Maine and, as we were packing to go, we thought about Bird. My wife was actually the one to suggest that we could take her, and by then she had begun allowing me to pick her up, so I did. She came with us to Maine. We later learned she was pregnant, but were able to adopt three of her four kittens out to good homes, and the 12 year-old is the one we didn't adopt out. This is by way of introduction to my review of this toy. Bird is 23 years old now. One of my other four cats (the mother of the sisters) got cancer at the age of 24, so I'm back to four cats again. Bird has never lost her love for toys, but it's hard to know what she will consider to be worth playing with. I have bought countless toys for her that she has ignored, while she is always able to find a good toy in my sock drawer. When she has a toy that she particularly likes, she howls, as she did for the stray cats in the neighborhood in Texas, perhaps hoping that one of my other cats will respond. They never do, but she tries anyhow. She has a distinct howl that she uses when she's bringing in a live critter, such as a bird or a mouse, and she has also brought in snakes and even a small snapping turtle once. She generally brings them in unharmed, as if to have something to play with later, although after about the fourth or fifth trip, some of the frogs have been known to have a limp. She has another howl that she uses when she has a cat toy, and I can tell the two howls apart easily, so I generally know when she has a live one; so do the other cats, as she does have their interest when she brings a real critter in. However, for this little squiggly worm, she uses what sounds, to me, like the same howl that she uses when she had a live animal, although my other cats don't respond to it, so there must be a difference that is undetectable to flawed human ears. My point is that it is apparent, even from the howl that she makes when she has it, that her squiggly worm is a very special toy indeed. It is obvious that it is her favorite toy from the amount of time that she spends batting it around, picking it up and throwing it into the air, then taking it with her when she retires to a cat bed. She has had it for about three years now, and it's doing fine. I suppose I could rate it down a couple of stars because my other cats couldn't care less about it but, to Bird, it's definitely a five-star cat toy, and she's the resident expert on cat toys. A few months ago, I noticed that I hadn't seen her with her worm for awhile. I looked for it but couldn't find it. A few days ago, I was rearranging my office when I found it behind a bookcase. She had apparently batted it back there and then couldn't reach it. I set it on the steps for her to find it and, within a half hour, I heard the howl that let me know that she had found her squiggly worm again. I just ordered another so that the next time it disappears, I'll have a replacement.
