My most recent one never bothered with that - intuiting when he wished to play and fulfilling the resulting obligation was
my job, and it doesn't do to get too indiscriminately familiar with the help - but he did learn not just what the laser pointer was and looked like, but what the tactile switch under its "on" button
sounded like. I liked to sneak the dot up on him when I could, but it very soon became a game of "how quietly can I actuate the switch?" versus "how faint a click can he hear?" - a game I rarely won, especially once he further learned to recognize the distinctive rattle of the batteries moving in the laser pointer case! There are probably
bombs easier to defuse than it eventually became to retrieve and activate the laser stealthily enough for the dot to come as a surprise - if nothing else, it was a great opportunity to find out how much I've
really learned from a lifetime spent mostly in company with cats.
The thing about tact switches, though, is that they all generally sound quite alike, and he was used to not immediately seeing the dot when he heard one. So, through the latter decade or so of this cat's life, it was quite common for the following sequence of events to play out several times a day:
- I adjust the volume on my phone;
- the cat glances excitedly around the floor, then expectantly at me;
- I hold up the phone for him to see;
- the cat and I simultaneously settle back to what we were doing before.
Confused the hell out of a boyfriend one time.
