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Toxic relationship
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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Also don't play fight with a cat, especially a kitten using your hand. If you want to play fight use a stuffed animal or something. Teach them from an early age that human hands are not toys.
My cat would be really confused and probably a bit frightened at this point if I tried to roughhouse with her using my hand but if I get her "battle buddy" stuffed animal out it's on.
I tried to tell my wife this, multiple times. Now she wonders why the cat plays gentle with me but rough as hell with her.
She (the cat) will still attack my hand, but without claws or biting hard. She'll even get under the blankets to fight me through them.
The way I accomplished this was by teaching her that if she got too rough it meant no more playing for about an hour. Since she always wants to play, it was an effective deterrent.
OOOOH! Yes. That's another good point that I never even thought about. I just naturally never used my hands, because I don't like it anyways, but I always used a feather on a stick/string.
Another thing I never use is laserpens. I used to. I feel bad that I ever did. It's fun, but then you learn that cats play is only stimulating their hunting drives. And since they can catch the feather on a string, they feel a sense of satisfaction for having caught it. Whereas they can't catch a red dot. So never catching it apparently gives them PTSD. They feel depressed that they can't be good hunters if they can't catch the red dot.
If you were using both, it was probably okay. The cat quickly learns the red dot is a lie and either decides not to chase it, or decides it's good for a bit of pouncing and then grabs a different toy to fight or a snack of kibble to bite.
Depends on the cat too. I've got one right now that only wants to chase, not catch. He doesn't care about catching the feather on the string, or the toy that I throw, he just wants an excuse to go zoom.
It'd be nice if he could figure out how to fetch though. I'll throw a toy, and he'll go racing after it, but then when he gets to it he just comes back to me so I can throw another one.
One of mine. She's only interested as long as it's moving. I once woke up to her with a mouse in her mouth, then she dropped it because it wasn't doing anything.
The mouse was safely corraled into a tshirt and let outside. His siblings were less fortunate and met the elder floof who is part maine coon and all murder machine.
If i used the laserpen, i made it a rule to always at the end put some treats somewhere and point the laser there, which seems to be adequate compensation for their effort ;-)
My partner and I foster cats, and most of them love it when we roll toys back and forth between each other for them to chase/intercept. One time we decided to use an "invisible toy" where we just brushed our knuckles against the carpet as if we were rolling/catching something, and our poor foster kitty freaked the fuck out and it took a good 10 minutes or so for him to get back to baseline after we realized we should stop. Never done that bit again 😅
Play fighting is fine, they just need to learn claw control. Recoil and stop play when you get clawed. I've got three cats here I can wrestle with without getting a mark on my hands or arms. A long thick jumper they know is safe, but bare skin they know is not for claws. It's so well learned that even when you need to do some maintenance or intervention they don't like, they will not claw you. Like washing diarrhea out of their fur, or some emergency medical intervention.
Yeah, I have a cat who my roommate 13 years ago taught to play with his hand, and let him bite and scratch as hard as he wanted. He would bite hard. It took a while, but I got him to stop by just immobilizing my hand when he started latching on, which made him lose interest and loosen his grip. I'd also give him a high-pitched "ooow" as an audible cue. Once I got my hand out I would poke his nose and say "no bites" then pet him on his forehead. Every once in a while he still regresses, but instead of biting now he almost always just aggressively headbutts your hand.
So, are hand puppets a middle ground?
Yeah I lived with someone who ruined the cat by rough housing with bare skin… I have extremely fragile skin and will bleed from touching the edge of cardboard, so you can imagine what cat claws do to me. Even the cat gently dragging it's nail across my skin will cut me open like a sausage. It took so, so long to unlearn those habits from the cat…