Kitty Rules
As most of you may have guessed from my last post: “Small But Mighty, Kitty..” I was having a bit of “adopters remorse.” My cat seemed to be getting the best of me and seemed to not really like me so much (the whole biting while being petted thing.) I figured the hell with that! I don’t particularly enjoy shoveling cat crap either! So, last night while I was on the web I googled:
“Why cats bite while being petted”
and 476,000 entries popped up! Ah! I wasn’t the only victim of cat aggression! So I looked around quite a bit and learned tons about kitty behavior. It was amazing how a little research & their applicaion has turned me & Shana Punim’s relationship around. Especially helpful was “The Dumb Friends League” and Pat Johnson-Bennett’s article: “Think like a cat” The behavior even has a name: Petting Induced Aggression! I kid you not! Evidently, the behavior can be caused by a number of factors. Here are a couple of the causes:
For some cats, continual stroking crosses from pleasure to over-stimulation. For other cats, it could be that he started to doze off and the touch of your hand startled him, and he reacted.
Basically, kitty is over the petting and wants you to stop. They also listed some of the physical signs to look for:
skin twitching, tail lashing, cessation of purring, change in ear position
“Hmmm…” I think to myself: “I’m gonna try this out.”
NOTE: Obviously I was a bit bored last night.
And so I started petting my little monster and lo and behold, after about four minutes her ears lay flat and so I stopped. (They recommend not snatching your hand away, it seems that sudden movement makes them more aggressive – your hand becomes “a mouse”) I stopped petting the beastie and after a few moments, gently pulled my hands away and we were just fine. Then later I repeated the petting except when I saw the ears go back I kept petting her and of course she bit me, but instead of snatching my hands back (which I would normally do, which then leads her to wrapping all four of her legs and paws around my wrist in a death-grip with more intense biting) I just held them still. In a few seconds she sopped biting and proceeded to purr again and started licking her paws.
Lesson learned.
P.S. BONUS: She spotted, captured and ate a big creepy crawly of some sort that was scurrying across my living room carpet. She is my heroine.
Filed under: In the Life of a Diva
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Hi Lynne,
I’m so glad you decided to adopt, I’m betting you won’t be sorry. It’s worth the little bit of messiness/smelliness, I think, to have a little being in your home giving you love & laughter.
I am the kind of person who has never been without a pet, so I am biased! Right now I have 4 kitties & a turtle: Chuck, Stripey, Chip, Dale, and Myrtle.
1 stripeymeow said this (December 30, 2008 at 2:46 pm)
LOL. I just found my watch that kitty batted off my end table a few days ago! And just yesterday, I was wondering if I had made a mistake in bringing this monster into my home, I alsofelt an overwhelming affection for the little beastie at the same time…OY! gotta go see what she is chewing on!!
2 Lynne said this (December 31, 2008 at 4:12 pm)
“Myrtle” the Turtle?
3 Lynne said this (December 31, 2008 at 4:29 pm)
Mm-hmm, Myrtle the Turtle… maybe not very original, but it’s better than Leroy (long story).
And Chip & Dale, my twins, are the litter mates that I adopted, after I had a dream about chipmonks, & in the dream the chipmonks turned into kittens. I figured it was a sign.
And Stripey, she actually doesn’t have a stripe on her, she’s a tortoise-shell calico. But when she was born, she had a twin sister, & the only way to tell them apart was the design on their little foreheads, one looked like a line, the other looked like a dot, therefore: “Stripey” and “Spot”
4 stripeymeow said this (January 6, 2009 at 3:57 pm)
Well thank you for the background. Really! I love it!! Thanks for writing. Shana Punim is lounging on the keyboard right now!!
5 Lynne said this (January 7, 2009 at 5:11 am)
I like Myrtle the Turtle. Tell me about “Leroy!”
6 Lynne said this (January 7, 2009 at 5:11 am)
Hi Lynne,
I was going to ask you what your kitty’s name meant, then decided to look it up, and found this link:
http://www.cultclassicts.com/cgi-bin/shirt.cgi/3616005339.cultclassicts.1096886+shana-punim.html
If only their little baby face logo was a kitty face, it would be perfect for you!
Maybe if you get the tote bag or the mouse pad, you could draw on it with a sharpie or something, turn the face into a cat… Unless of course, you’re like me, and even just stick figures are a challenge.
I’ll be back with the story of how Leroy turned into Myrtle, the turtle who thinks she’s a cat with nine lives…
Does your comment section have a limit on the number of words in each comment?
7 stripeymeow said this (January 7, 2009 at 1:42 pm)
Nah… now word limit here!! Can’t wait to hear how a turtle behaves when she thinks she has nine lives…
8 Lynne said this (January 7, 2009 at 10:57 pm)
Hi Lynne,
We (that’s the collective we of my Mom, Belinda, my Granny, and I) all call those “Love Bites”! When I was a teenager we had a cat who would love bite and then lick you to apologize. Every time she did it you could tell by the look on her face that “oops I did bad, must kiss and make up now”.
Even now with Tom’s cat Biscuit when she gets over stimulated (usually when Tom won’t leave her alone, what else is a blind cat supposed to do) she will grab on and let him have. Only thing is usually I get it too since she crosses the table between his chair and me on the couch and then gives me the “look”.
It’s like I was the one who let him over stimulate her. LOL Awww the life with cats.
Stephanie
9 AnieTiddens said this (January 7, 2009 at 11:29 pm)
@ AnieTiddens/Stephanie: How does a blind cat give you a “look”??
Inquiring minds want to know!
I also call them “love bites”, ever since I had a cross-eyed Siamese (Suki Yaki) who would lay on my chest as I rubbed her neck & ears, & she’d stare at me with those beautiful blue eyes (at least, I thought she was staring at me), and purr like a motor boat, & gently bite me on the chin, & hold it for a while, then when she let go she’d give me a lick… Ohh, how I loved that cat!
10 stripeymeow said this (January 8, 2009 at 2:05 pm)
Lynne,
thank you for encouraging me to write Myrtle’s story, I’ve been wanting to for a long time now, but I’m a great procrastinator!
It’s always been one of my favorite stories to tell, verbally, and now that I’m writing it down, I’m remembering details I’d previously left out of the verbal version. As a result, this story is very long, I’m not even close to done, and when I do finish I probably will post it on a writing website, like smithmag.net.
Do you want me to send you the link when I do?
Meanwhile, I will give you the abbreviated version of how Leroy turned into Myrtle!
Coming soon, to a comment near you…
11 stripeymeow said this (January 8, 2009 at 2:10 pm)
The short version of how Leroy turned into Myrtle:
First of all, when this turtle was rescued, we didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. There’s nothing but a shell, a head, a tail, & 4 legs! No distinguishing features at all. And none of us had previous turtle experience. So we just called it “it” or “he”, until we found out we had to keep it for a while, then my boss decided it had to have a name. “Leroy”, he said, arbitrarily. Ok, whatever, it’s not like it mattered, it wasn’t permanent, right?
Later, as we all were gradually learning more about turtles than we ever wanted to know, the boss saw a PBS special about turtles & tortoises, & said that the female shell is flat on the bottom, & the males’ is concave, for easier mating purposes. Our turtle was flat-bottomed, therefore a girl, so I said, “Myrtle!”
(Highly influenced by Dr. Seuss at an impressionable age)
Why does this turtle think she’s a cat?
Because she lives with cats, and acts like a cat, so she must be a cat. She thinks. She competes with the cats for the sun spot on the floor. She rubs against my leg (well, foot) when she wants attention, or she’s hungry, or when she wants to point out that the cats have once again been drinking from her personal private water bowl.
She has her little idiosyncracies, therefore she must be a cat.
Right?
Whe does she have nine lives?
Because she’s a cat.
No, just kidding.
Because she narrowly escaped death before she was rescued by my boss, & came to live with us in the office.
Because she nimbly escaped from my home, trotted down my front steps, scrambled out to the street & could have been run over by a car…
Because there in the street she was kidnapped by an evil thieving bicyclist who I’m sure had good intentions, but who also (I’m sure) had no idea how to care for a turtle
Because four days later she was ruthlessly abandoned by the evil bicyclist and left to die by unimaginable means, in a park next to a river
So, she has like, 4 or 5 lives left, probably. Who knows what kind of adventures she had before she came into MY life.
Now you do want to know what happened next, don’t you?
Am I fooling myself that this is a great story?
Be honest, I can take it.
12 stripeymeow said this (January 8, 2009 at 2:39 pm)
Hee… I was just reading over my last comment, & when I got to “flat-bottomed”, I thought, “Hey, she’s a flat-bottomed girl, didn’t Queen sing a song about that?”
13 stripeymeow said this (January 8, 2009 at 4:54 pm)
Aloha LYnne & Kitty – hey, Kitty’s a great subject and all, heck I could write volumes about Manele & Koele…….But I want to know WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO? How was NY again?
Just a simple aloha to you and lots of love! XOXO A hui hou!
14 manele said this (January 11, 2009 at 8:38 pm)
Hello Stripeymeow,
Well let’s see she turns her head towards you and stares towards you and it’s like she says “seriously” LOL Yeah it is hard for her to find you if you don’t talk, but somehow she finds you. LOL It’s funny now with our new kitten. He was playing with a toy the other day and accidentally bumped into Biscuit and well he got the look and ran for his life. LOL
And right now she is trying to push the laptop out of her way so she can snuggle. LOL Oh it is a Biscuit World. LOL
15 AnieTiddens said this (January 20, 2009 at 9:51 am)
Wow! I missed these comments!! My web manager musta approved them. I get a notification when there is a comment for approval. Thanks everyone for chiming in!! Now, i gotta go read ‘em!! Got to go back and read about Leroy/Myrtle!!
16 Lynne said this (January 24, 2009 at 5:41 pm)
Hey Stripeymeow: It’s Fat Bottomed Girls! & How did you find Myrtle by the river?
17 Lynne said this (March 28, 2009 at 5:49 am)