cats

My old house ended up with a mouse problem in the utility room (which was weird, we couldnt find where they were coming from, and never any mouse evidence in any other room, so we could only guess it was because it was warm? The mice were pretty skinny) And my single orange brain cell absolutely loved playing with them if they ignored the set traps and crawled under the door. He would play and play and play, until I guess the mouse simply died of exhaustion or maybe being chomped just right.

Anyway, it was dead, and he'd still bat it around, and eventually I'd hear him yowling as if he'd lost a toy somewhere he can't reach, and sure enough he batted the dead mouse under the couch down there.

To this day, toy mice are by far his favorite thing to play with. He'll play with feathered wands and catnip kickers, but a toy mouse he'll play with alone or with you any time of day for up to a couple hours at a time.

You could try not letting your cat out, that’s a neat trick.

...our orange kitty does the same, but he's the smartest cat we've ever known: perfectly adept at opening doors on his own, so we must keep them all deadbolted lest we find wild critters brought into the house, which has happened on several occasions...

(he's also pretty good at operating our ipads and desktop computers; he's sent gibberish text-messages more than once and i worry that someday he'll buy something online!)