When you have a toddler in the house, you soon learn to put things out of reach. With owning a cat I have found that just putting things up, is not good enough.
Bread ties (the little wire used to seal the plastic), was always a great magnet for one of my cats. She could be sound asleep in the other room, or so I thought. Take out the bread, lay the tie on the counter, walk out of the room and return within 20 seconds. Bread tie gone! She was down on the floor playing with it. Not sure if it would have been a problem, but I always figured she could start chewing on it. Don’t think the wire is something that would be very good for consumption.
For years, we had no problem with any of the cats and the garbage can in the bathroom. Then Minnie came along. Don’t know what it was that attracted her to it, but she was constantly tipping it over and pulling things out. No more dental floss was allowed in the bathroom garbage. Well, one day it was not disposed of quickly in the alternative places we had chosen and it was gone. Panic set in, she had to have swallowed it. Vet’s office was not open up for a couple of hours! Out of desperation I force fed her some butter, hoping that it would nicely coat her intestines and maybe expel the foreign matter. Took her to the vet as soon as I could, they immediately sent me up the street to the emergency clinic, so they could retrieve all that was in her stomach. Six hundred dollars later, still no dental floss. All I could do was wait and check her stool, hoping that it would all come out and not cut up anything inside on the way out. Happy to say after a day of waiting around, it was retrieved in the stool. Costly lesson and we immediately purchased a heavy duty metal can with a lid that is cat proof!
Same cat, grabbed a ribbon that was attached to a stylus for my embroidery machine, this was just seconds after I had left the room. When she came flying into see me the stylus was dangling from her mouth. After she had got the ribbon all the way in her mouth, she couldn’t do anything with the stylus. Not sure if she realized she was in a predicament and that was why she came to see me. I was able to rescue her. Can’t leave that unattended ever again!
Pin cushions, with or without needles and thread, even a spool of thread should never be left alone. They seem to be as cleaver as a magician and his bag of tricks. Even a sewing machine with thread dangling is fair game. You can be sitting there with the pin cushion and just mending something and before you know they have grabbed a threaded needle. At least the times that has happened I have been a little quicker than their get-away. But it is very scary.
Rubber bands are another thing they might like to grab. I have got so accustomed to putting them on my wrist when taking one off at home, I find I do it outside of the home, which is not necessary.
Cat toys should be safe! Not necessarily so. I had a fishing line toy, it has a piece of cloth on it and a fishing line. Well, left alone for a short period of time, I returned to find half the line and the cloth devoured. It showed up later in the litter box. That toy is only out under strict supervision from now on.
Another toy that we had a bad experience with, was a bird on one of those stretch elastic strings. We had it hanging on the cat tree. Andy was playing with it one night, grabbing it and it would fly back. Well this one time it ended up wrapping around his neck. My husband happened to be up and heard him struggling and gasping. He immediately got him loose. I would hate to think what we could have got up to in the morning. I don’t know if him falling could have broke the elastic or if it would have strangled him to death.
I am so programmed to keep things out of the reach of cats. If I go stay in a hotel, I find I am taking the same precautions as I do at home out of habit. Which is probably a good habit to get into if you have pets.