One of my favorite customers came to see me at work last week with a present for me. It was an electronic cat toy called “Cat’s Meow.” He said he ended up with two and since he knew I had cats thought I would have a use for it.

It took me a couple of days to get batteries but I finally got around to putting it together last weekend. It is a fairly simple concept yet it is amazing that nobody had thought of this before. The toy consists of a motor that turns an arm back and forth around a circle. At the end of the arm is a small ball and attached to that is a tail, or at least what passes as a tail. The mechanism is then covered with a round cloth so that only the tail sticks out.

I put it on the ground on the patio and as soon as I turned it on Chris and Puck both became very interested in it. I started it on fast but soon found that slow worked better. I got out my video camera and recorded them playing with it for almost ten minutes before going inside. I forgot about it an came back twenty minutes later to turn it off and saw Chris and Puck were both still there playing with the new toy.

I would give the Cat’s Meow a thumbs up for holding Chris’s attention for that long but it remains to be seen whether it can withstand the punishment of two cats. Below is a portion of the video I mentioned.