You love buying your cat the cutest toys, only for them to end up in a basket never used or on the floor where you trip over. There could be a better solution — making your cat a toy.
Redditors were quite excited about making their fur baby a toy instead of buying something they wouldn't end up playing with.
A cat parent posted an image of a homemade scratching toy in the r/Anticonsumption subreddit. It shows two toys, one new and one used, made using pieces of trash and held together with a cardboard container for canned food.
The poster said their seven cats have loved it for over four years.
"No glue (because I'm lazy, cheap, and it doesn't really need any), the cats will pull out the bits, I just shove them back in the way god and nature intended," they wrote.
According to Waste Advantage Magazine, the pet industry has a waste problem, including food, toys, and packaging. While your old cat scratching toy can be recycled, BioCycle reported 56% of the 110 million metric tons of cardboard and paper discarded ended up in a landfill in the U.S. in 2019. Only 38% was recycled, and the rest ended up being burned.
These landfills are detrimental to the communities that live near them. Per Community and Environmental Defense Services, they cause health risks to residents, pollute water, lower home values, increase heavy truck traffic on nearby roads, and cost the community money in taxes to minimize their impacts.
Creating your own cat toys or upcycling something in your house can help mitigate this problem. It can also save you money. Those cute cat toys aren't always cheap, and you might just have something your cat will want to play with.
You can also use other things to create fun toys for your cat. For example, one cat parent made an indoor playground out of reclaimed wood, which was sure to keep their cat busy for hours.
Another way you can help mitigate the pet waste problem is by choosing pet brands with plastic-free packaging.
The fellow cat parents were excited about this hack in the comments.
One said, "This is so satisfying to look at."
Another cat parent said, "Cats love trash more than real toys anyway. So cool."
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