Cats don’t need accessories. I should have learned this truth years ago when I bought various catnip-scented felt mice and threw them around the house hoping that my old cat Tutti would play with them. But he was never interested in these fancy toys and preferred to play with scrunched up balls of paper. We got our two newer cats, Sonic and Mystic, as kittens so I imagined things would be different. For our first Christmas with Sonic and Mystic, they were still little, so “Santa” filled stockings for them too, but the toy mice they received were played with for a couple of minutes and left abandoned in corners of the house or under dressers, where they eventually made friends with the dust bunnies. Sonic’s idea of a fun is to run around the house jumping onto furniture or bouncing off the doorframes, while Mystic loves scrunched up aluminum foil and wire twisties from bread bags. The only time when the cats seem interested in the mice is when they are attached to a string and dangled in front of them – then fun happens but that requires a lot of work on my part and there is only so much time I can devote to entertaining cats.

So, I should have known that the cats wouldn’t dig the Scratch Den my son Theo persuaded me to buy at Target last year. I have had it sitting in our office hoping that they would choose to scratch it up rather than the couches. We have another scratch post, which Sonic obediently uses, but Mystic – the tricky one – still prefers the couches. Despite all my efforts to show Mystic how to use this Scratch Den, at least as a little hiding place (and she loves hiding!), she chooses to ignore it. So, today, I officially gave up on the silly thing and took it to the local vets where I left it outside to be taken home by someone with more obedient cats or high hopes for their naughty cats. Now, if I can just get Mystic to use the scratch post, we won’t have to give away the couches this year!