Free Idea du Jour: A New Cat Toy

Yesterday I watched this cracking little homage to the feline love for flushing the toilet:

I was reminded of a possibly apocryphal story in which a couple had an enormous water bill, and couldn’t figure out why. Eventually one of them stayed home sick, and discovered that their cat was an obsessive toilet flusher.

I was musing last night about what cats love about flushing the toilet. I figured that it was the total disconnection between cause and effect: “I do something up here, and something totally unexpected happens down there. And it’s noisy and swirling!”

I imagined a cat toy that comes in two parts:

• A button or lever that sits flat on the ground, that’s easy for the cat to push on and engage.
• A little battery-powered car, with big wheels outside its body so that it can run upside down or right-side up. It’s configured so that it tends to drive in circles, or certainly not only in a straight line. It makes noise when it moves. For extra points, it’s got a little brain in it that prevents it from driving too far away from the button.

When the cat pushes the button, the car jumps to life and drives around for, I don’t know, 45 seconds. The cat gets fascinated, and repeats ad nauseum.

What do you think? Does such a toy already exist?