We've had plenty of cats, and most - if not all of them - simply didn't care about toys: we'd buy them toys, they'd play with them for 10 seconds and then leave them there.

The difference with this one is, all our previous cats were free to go outside. All of them were very happy to bring us back dead mice and birds, much to our dismay. But none of them would fetch a fake critter over and over, and happily play with the same clearly-fake toys.

This one does because she's never been outside: we currently live in a country that doesn't allow free-roaming cats, so I don't think she's known anything other than fake prey before we adopted her. That's why she still plays with her toys.

This will change in a 2 months though, as I'm having a large fenced-off park build in the backyard for her to catch some fresh air and enjoy a bit of nature lawfully. I fully expect her to abandon her toys once she discovers the real thing.

[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 3 points 4 days ago

Not definitely - our three weren't allowed outside until their 1st birthday, but since that (they're almost 4) they come and go as they please during daylight hours (we're in the UK where this is normal). All three still play fetch, but only with specific types of toys.

One fetches fluffy toys with feather "tails", one fetches sweet wrappers or bits of paper and one fetches old cat collars (which is very useful - if one loses their collar, he normally picks it up and brings it home for us). Collar-fetcher and wrapper-fetcher get bored a bit quicker these days, but feather-toy-fetcher will play fetch for ages.