This post is part of my continuing series of reviews on cat supplies, where I review everything I’ve bought for my cat Benny so far. You can find the first post on the basic cat supplies here. This post categorizes the things that aren’t necessary per se but we bought them for one reason or another.
Cat Tree
My husband was so excited to buy the Vesper Cat Tree. I think he had it in his Amazon cart before we even adopted Benny. And I can see why! It is made of sturdy materials, looks classy, has a lot of surface area for a cat to climb and play on, and has memory foam on the platforms!
Unfortunately Benny didn’t use it for several months. We tried catnip, we tried placing his shelter blanket on it, we tried just placing him on top, but he would always immediately climb down. Very disappointing.
Until, recently, we had to move the tree out of its corner. Then suddenly Benny started using it! He climbs it like a jungle gym, watches us carefully from the top platform, and occasionally curls up to sleep in the box. However, he does not scratch on the posts at all, and the three wicker balls have rarely caught his attention. So it’s about 50/50 on useful features for our cat. But I would still recommend, as it is very well built and provides Benny with more space to explore that isn’t our bookshelf or kitchen counters.
Cat Window Hammock
The Cat Window Hammock is easily one of the best cat supplies we have purchased for Benny. He loves it and lays on it daily for hours at a time. It allows him to get a higher view of the outdoors than the back of our couch, and he can get right into the action of watching all the birds and bugs on our porch.
The window hammock has a very simple design, constructed of PVC pipe, wire and suction cups. It’s easy to tear down, as you only have to pull off the bottom piping and the ledge will lay flat against the window, allowing you to close the curtains or blinds. We have never had to readjust or reapply the suction cups, or really alter anything since adding it to our front window. The only caveat is to double check that your window will fit the hammock – most of our windows slide open horizontally and the hammock was too wide, so our only choice was our front window.
Cat collar
We found out the hard way that black cats have natural camouflage against a dark wood floor, especially in the dark. After a week of almost tripping or stepping on him, we decided to invest in a cat collar, in the hopes that he would be easier to spot.
It was important to me that the collar fulfill a couple of requirements. One, that the collar be reflective, for easy spotting. Two, that it have a quiet tag. And three, the most important, that it had a breakaway clasp, so that the collar wouldn’t get caught on anything and hurt Benny.
The TagMe cat collar matches all three of those things. It comes in several colors – I chose turquoise as it goes with the Seattle Kraken color scheme. It does come with a bell, but that is easily removable if you don’t want your cat to make that much of a ruckus. I appreciate that the TagMe collar not only has a breakaway clasp, but has one that is a round circle. Several others collars I found have clasps modeled in the face of a cat, which is cute, but the cat ears look sharp and pointy and uncomfortable.
The collar comes with a customizable plate, where we put Benny’s name and a phone number, in case he is ever successful in darting out of the house. Anecdotally, we did have fewer issues spotting him in our house with the addition of the bright collar.
Litter Mat
Before we purchased our litter robot (review here!), we had a open tray litter box because we didn’t really plan ahead when we adopted Benny, and we needed a box immediately. I would not recommend that approach long-term for a variety of reasons, one of those being that there’s a lot of litter that ends up on the floor around the tray. The Pieviev Litter Mat helped contain some of that mess.
The mat uses a simple concept – the litter will be caught by the upper hexagon layer, but will filter down into the lower layer making it easy to pour the captured litter out. This didn’t solve all of our litter scatter problems, but it did make most of it easy to clean. We still use it with our litter robot, and that combination has led to almost no stray litter.
Cat Toy Box
Apparently they don't sell the version that says "Cat Toys" anymore 🤷🏼♀️ but this is what we bought.
After adopting Benny, we acquired a lot of cat supplies, treats, and toys. We needed a convenient place to store all of these things, where Benny couldn’t reach them, but we could access them quickly. The Morezi Cat Toy Storage Box fit the bill.
The storage box is fairly basic, it has two flaps to provide quick access to two storage areas. We ended up removing the inner divider so we could fit the longer stick feather toys in the container. But having the double flaps is still very useful, as Benny has been able to associate the sound of the velcro to the release of toys, so we have to be very quick opening the box to prevent a nosy cat from climbing in. The box itself looks nice and fits perfectly under our coffee table.
Cat Supplies – Conclusion
Well that’s about it for the second installment of my cat supplies series! There’s at least one more planned, and then who knows, I will still be purchasing goods for my cat, so there might be more! Is there anything that I’ve missed so far? Anything you as a cat parent would recommend? Let me know in the comments!
