Millie and Buster and Millie and Buster
Years ago, I went back to my hometown to visit family. While visiting the local Ikea, I found a basket full of toy stuffed cats. They came in two colours: striped yellow and grey with white stomach, which is nearly a perfect match to my own cats waiting back home. We bought one of each and left them on the bed in the guest room, where my parents' dog roughed them up and threw them onto the floor, maybe sensing they were his competition (but probably for a much more logical instinctual motivation). Prior to kicking them out of bed.


After the trip they came home with us and met the real cats, beginning a very strange relationship. Here's the four of them all together (staged).


Over the next few years, every once in a while I'd come home to find someone had mysteriously brought the stuffed cats over to the eating area, often leaving them mouth-down in the food or water bowl. This didn't interest me the first dozen or so times it happened.

I moved to a new apartment that had an ant problem, so I set up a small table for the cat food bowls and water. This now meant that not only would the toys have to be brought over, but they'd have to be lifted up a bit too.

Then once my parents were visiting me, and I specifically remember putting both stuffed cats on the couch and we went to a nearby market for lunch. When we returned, both stuffed cats had been moved to the table, and one was face down in the cat food bowl while the other one was lined up behind it.

This has happened many more times.
An older picture from a previous apartment
Again Again Again Again Again Again Again Again
And after what looks like a pretty wild cat party.

Of course I'm not going to believe these things are coming alive while I'm gone, but why are the cats doing this? I came up with two equally ridiculous theories:
1. They thought these things were real cats that needed food, or would become real cats if they ate.
2. They considered them like voodoo dolls, in that anything that happens to the toys happens to the corresponding cats. So, feeding them would somehow sustain the living cats.

I used to set up my webcam at home so I could watch my cats while I was at work, and also occasionally play YouTube clips for them of things like bird calls, laughing hyenas, and lions roaring in order to get their attention. Once, I witnessed Buster attack and carry off his doppelganger. When I got home it was at the table.

It was pretty violent and he was shaking it in his jaws as if trying to bite off a piece of flesh. I later read somewhere it's common for cats to collect objects such as toys that they like and to store them where they eat, so I guess that's case closed. Still, it's been pretty weird to watch this behaviour in them for the last few years.

Millies (plus some damage to my wallpaper) and Busters
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Mon 4 Feb 2013, 6:08, 1 reply)

Similar story
My mate keeps cats, and he bought one of the original Whiskers Kittens (Lois) at a time when it was about 11 years old and hadnt got long left. After a brief TV career then a decade of breeding kittens this high-grade pedigree Silvertip Tabby had been set to a rehoming place for strays, as being too old to breed, she no longer had value to her owners.

Lois was a very sweet-tempered cat with only one major quirk. Left to her own devices she would collect every rolled-up sock in the house and leave them in an arc around the food bowls. My mate reckoned she thought they were kittens.
(Carpe Cyprinidae, Mon 4 Feb 2013, 17:59, closed)