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Am I the only person with a cat that is super careful with their teeth and claws, such that they don’t pierce skin? He’ll lightly place his claws on skin or take a finger between his teeth and apply very light pressure when he doesn’t want to be touched.
The “scream in pretend pain whenever you feel anything sharp” method has trained him to be very aware of his killing tools.
The only time I have claws viciously dug into me is when he kneads me in relaxation, and that’s an instinctual behaviour I don’t think he can resist.
At this point i just conclude that a truly terrifying amount of people are lowkey mistreating their pets and operate under the assumption that a pretty severely unhappy pet is actually normal.
Like all the “funny” posts about how cats are so unfriendly and whatnot, bitch what the fuck are you doing to your cat to make it behave like that? all the cats i’ve ever interacted with have at worst been indifferent, and most of the time they’ll merrily make their way over for scritches and love.
A violent cat isn’t normal and it’s not funny, it means it’s not happy for crying out loud! i would wager that the most common problem is that they’re bored out of their skulls and are in dire need of playtime and ideally having a second cat in the household so they can entertain each other.
Mine definitely isn’t gentle, but I think that that’s only because I don’t mind getting a little bit scratched up when playing with him so I only taught him to keep it to that. He understands that playtime is over otherwise. He seems to understand when he has done more than he meant to as well, he immediately goes from fighting to affectionate
Same experience with kneading though. It’s very cute that he’s so happy and comfortable but holy shit cat your claws are so sharp
I’ve never used my hands directly for play, so that probably makes a difference. He only gets to go full wild animal on wand toys and such. I don’t mind some scratches either, but I made it a point to really make even the slightest catching on skin to be off-limits, so as to be able to let others handle him without worry. Especially with one of sisters starting off quite scared of him.
And yup, the kneading can go from 0 to 100 very suddenly.