How to Stop Your Kitten From Scratching & Biting You

Play with your kitten calmly to prevent aggressive behavior.

While biting and scratching are natural play behaviors for a kitten, they are not desirable in a pet. Even a kitten has the power to bite and scratch hard, a force that will only multiply as the kitten gets older. If you have a kitten who exhibits theses behaviors, you can take steps to ensure it stops. Taming down your kitten's natural aggression allows it to grow into a healthy, calm cat.

Things You'll Need

• Cat toys

Instructions

1. Play gently with your kitten. Avoid wrestling with it, or causing it to attack your hands or your body. You want to avoid forming a connection in the kitten's mind between hands and aggressive behavior.

2. Distract your kitten with a toy. While aggressive behavior towards humans is unacceptable, aggressive behavior towards cat toys is fine. Encourage and praise your kitten when it lunges at its toys.

3. Remove your kitten from your body when it pounces you aggressively. Avoid moving quickly or aggressively because the kitten will simply see that as part of the game. Instead, walk away from the kitten and refuse to play with it.

4. Put your kitten down when it starts squirming. Some biting and scratching happens because the kitten is overstimulated from petting and playing. If your kitten starts squirming, put it down and let it calm down before playing with it again.

Tips & Warnings

• Excessive biting and scratching from a kitten tends to occur when kittens are taken away from their mothers too soon. Allow a kitten to stay with its mother for at least 12 weeks before taking it home.

References

• Cats of Australia; Aggressive Kittens
• W.V. Cats; Help for Cats Biting; Margaret Schill
• Pet Education; Petting-related Aggression in Cats; Holly Nash, DVM, MS