Darth Vader is a good example of why little kittens need to be raised properly. We think (though we can't prove, as we don't know his history), his raising had one big mistake.
It's "cute" when a 1 month old kitten tries to bite when playing. It's "cute" to wiggle fingers and watch a 2 month old kitten try and pounce on them.
It ceases very rapidly to be cute when that little tiny kitten becomes an adult, or even an 8 month old kitten with full sized teeth. It becomes harder to correct the older the cat becomes and can make them unadoptable.
Vader is a playful kitten. Unfortunately, he wants to play with our hands--mainly trying to pounce and bite them. This is not appropriate behavior, period. Fortunately, he seems to be careful and doesn't bite hard. Since he does seem to distinguish humans from other things he bites, we are hoping he's still young enough we can teach him proper behavior.
The basic theory is two fold. We stop playing with him and hiss at him if he tries to bite us, and we try to wear him out playing with proper toys.
He was not impressed with the balls or box with holes & toys inside. All our mice were long since headless, so we stopped by the society today to pick up a variety of toys. We now have a couple sticks with toys on string, a mouse, and a couple stuffed animals.
We're finding he's not quite sure what to do with the toys. I'm not sure how much experience he has with them. He bats a little bit at the toys, and watches any of them that are moving, but I almost feel like we're teaching him how to play with toys. Which, we might be, I suppose. We also propped one of the string toys up so it dangles in the room to encourage him when we aren't involved.
I hope we can shift him from biting us to biting toys. He is otherwise a very sweet kitten--and has an impressively loud purr that goes off a lot.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment