Inventor Cat dental wand
- Wand material: Food-grade silicone
- Why we love it
- Fun for you and your cat
- Relatively affordable
- Take note
- It’s a bit messy
The dental wand starter kit comes with the wand itself, which is made from food-grade silicone, a telescopic rod for interactive play, a worm-toy attachment to make play more engaging, and, to Pusky’s delight, a small bag of catnip. Keep in mind there’s no cat toothpaste included in the kit, so you’ll need to buy it separately.
To get started, I unscrewed the two halves of the wand and added a little bit of toothpaste and a small amount of Lick-e-Lix yoghurt (£1.50, Amazon.co.uk) to both (to make the toothpaste more palatable). I added a small sprinkle of catnip to the inside of one half of the wand, too, as per the instructions, which, naturally, grabbed Pusky’s attention.
At this point, I noticed things were getting quite messy. It’s quite tricky to squeeze the toothpaste into the wand without some overflow, and it started to seep through the little holes. Still, I’m sure there’s a toothpaste tube out there that will let you fill with more precision. However, I also would have liked something to make it easier to clean the inside of the wand between uses.
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When I gave the wand to Pusky, he seemed more interested in licking it than biting it at first, which may have been due to some of the yummy contents leaking onto the surface of the wand. He was also a little gooey from the catnip and seemed to enjoy rubbing his face on the wand and wriggling around on the floor, so I’ll try without the catnip going forward.
He did end up biting down, though, tentatively at first, but enough that I could pull the wand through his teeth several times, and he seemed engaged and happy enough while munching away.
I’m not sure whether the cleaning objective was totally fulfilled during our first session. Inventor Cat says you might need to do several sessions, long or short, depending on how your cat plays, so I’d say it might not be a quick job.
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However, the excitement really started to ramp up once the interactive play began. I attached the wand and the worm toy to the rod and moved them in sweeping motions over Pusky’s head, which immediately had him hooked. He jumped to catch it, batted it with his paws and at times bit down on it, but I did find he sometimes went for the worm (or even the rod) rather than the wand, so I’ll probably remove the toy in future.
Inventor Cat stresses that you should figure out your cat’s routine to make sure they’re going to be receptive, which I found to be very true. I repeated both parts of the cleaning process the next morning and found that, while Pusky did enjoy chewing and licking the wand a bit, he wasn’t really interested in playing with it.