Simple craft project lets you tell your cat, in no uncertain terms, that he exists on a higher plane than you do.
As we’ve seen before, sometime after you’ve gone to the trouble of spending your hard-earned cash on a thoughtful present for your pet cat, all the little guy wants to do is hang out in the box it came in, completely ignoring the gift itself. The pragmatic thing to do, then, is to spend your money on yourself, and give the box that whatever you wanted came in to your kitty.
Essentially giving your trash to your cat really takes a lot of the generosity out of the equation, though. With that in mind, maybe the best thing to do is to give your cat not just a box, but a box that you’ve made look awesome.
https://twitter.com/V_KITEI/status/724238914592997376There was a apparently a cardboard box lying around the home of Japanese Twitter user @V_KITEI, so her little sister decided to convert it into a sweet Shinto shrine for the family’s cat to relax in.
Cool as the finished product looks, it actually doesn’t appear to have been all that difficult to put together. Almost all the material for the ornamentations looks to have come from cutting out sections of the box itself and taping them back onto the main structure, with a few pieces of unlined notepad paper and marker coloring providing the white and black accents. There’s even a donation box, where instead of leaving monetary offerings for the resident deity @V_KITEI and her sister can leave snacks for the resident cat.
https://twitter.com/V_KITEI/status/724551457547001856Just as Shinto is a millennia-old faith, so too are cardboard box cat shrines steeped in tradition, with a history stretching back to at least 2015, when this tweet that inspired @V_KITEI’s sister was first sent out.
漫然にも年の初めはさだまさしを見るのに夢中になっていたオレは、初詣のことをすっかり忘れていた。自宅にいながら初詣をすませようというおろかな思案の末にたどり着いた答えとは… pic.twitter.com/JAr11XuYys
— cro (@cro_iz) January 3, 2015
So if you regularly get deliveries in the mail, you’ve already made a whack-a-mole game for your pet, and you can’t make it to one of Japan’s actual cat shrines, now you can make your own.
Source: Hamster Sokuho, Twitter/@V_KITEI

Why buy your cat a cat house when you can buy a cat shrine from Japan instead?
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