New Toy Friday #6 - Chirping Cat Balls!

Watch this week’s New Toy Friday video here and check out the toys themselves here.

In theory, battery-operated cat toys are a great idea. In practice, they’re a difficult medium to get just right.

Or at least that’s what my experience has been thus far. Flashy toys that move on their own and make noise seem like fantastic opportunities for feline enrichment, but the overwhelming majority of ones that I’ve tried have been rather lackluster, and tend to have less entertainment value than a piece of twine.

That being said, I’ll try anything once, and these Potaroma Chirping Cat Balls have 4.3 stars out of 5 from 2,428 ratings on Amazon.com (at the time of this posting, they are on sale and retailing at $11.89 for a three-pack). 

First good thing: the batteries are included and are already loaded inside of the toys. If I had opened the package to learn that I needed to go out and buy some CR2 lithium batteries, I would have just… not done that.

Since the batteries are in, all you need to do is pull out the plastic stopper tabs and you’re ready for action. There is a small bag of catnip included and a tiny little compartment in each toy to hold said catnip; I admittedly only put catnip in one of the trio, and it honestly didn’t seem to make much of a difference. 

There is one ball each in the colors blue, pink, and yellow, and each makes a different animal noise: cricket, frog, and bird. The noises are actually pretty great, and do indeed sound like the critters that they’re meant to (this seems like it should be the bare minimum but again, I haven't had much luck with noisy cat toys…)

Straight off the bat, Gandalf was enchanted, and knocked the balls off the counter before I’d even had the chance to read the instructions. Given that they are lightweight fluffy balls, the toys are rather versatile: Gandalf loves bapping them back and forth across the wood floors, (attempting to) disembowel them with her hind legs, and trotting around proudly with her “kill” clamped tightly in her mouth.

The cricket/frog/bird sounds are touch-activated but the noisemakers aren’t ridiculously sensitive, which I like: I think that that little bit of unpredictability encourages more curiosity on the part of the cats. 

Also worth noting is the fact that the balls are JUST large enough to avoid slipping under our doors, which have comically large gaps at the bottom for no discernable reason whatsoever. Seriously, I have never encountered doors with as much open space as ours have, and I spend an inordinate amount of time retrieving cat toys from the laundry room. It is SO NICE not having to do that with these.

Gandalf loves the balls, but Natilla and Dave have not yet expressed much interest. I’m taking that with a grain of salt, though, because while Gandalf is always ready to play (post-nap, mid-nap, at all hours of every day), Natilla and Dave tend to have more regimented times of friskiness. So we’re not writing off those two yet; I think Natilla will come to enjoy the chirping balls, and Dave probably will as well—provided he isn’t intimidated by them, of course.