bungled connections hurt my feelings on Tumblr

Two finger amulet, Egyptian Art

Purchase, Fletcher Fund and The Guide Foundation Inc. Gift, 1966 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Medium: Glass, black-blue

No, your cat is not tricking you or setting a trap for you. You’re just misreading what she’s trying to communicate.

Basically, there are two ways that cats bond with their colonymates (and if you own a cat, you count as a colonymate): grooming, and play. Grooming is self-explanatory; play mostly means means wrestling, because cats are hardcore like that.

A cat who wishes to engage in bonding - whether grooming or play - is going to do one of two things: either she’s going to initiate bonding, or she’s going to solicit bonding. A cat who wants to initiate bonding will just walk up and start licking or wrestling with with you; conversely, a cat who wants to solicit bonding will indicate, in some fashion, that she wants you to be the one to start grooming or playing with her.

Now, here’s the trick: because play for a cat typically means play-fighting, one of the most common ways for a cat to solicit play is to deliberately adopt a vulnerable position, thereby communicating that her prospective partner should mock-attack her in order to begin a wrestling match.

Sound familiar?

Basically, if your cat rolls over onto her back and looks at you really expectantly, like she’s anticipating some action on your part, and you go in for a belly rub and get your hand shredded, it’s not a kitty prank. Rather, you misinterpreted a solicitation for play as a solicitation for grooming.

You’ll save yourself a lot of blood loss if you learn to tell the difference!

(It’s possible to teach a cat how to roughhouse with a human partner without causing injury, but it takes work. If you aren’t able to put in that kind of training time, it’s usually best to redirect to a different form of play when you recognise that your cat is trying to get a wrestling match going; a game of chase is a popular alternative.)

“cats don’t act like dogs and therefore are assholes” is a thing basically only said by assholes

letsboldlygomotherfuckers

can confirm the thing about training your cats to wrestle gentler, my siamese will play fight and bite me *so* gently but go rough enough with my dad to occasionally draw blood because my dads always wrestled roughly with him which he loves but he knows my boundaries are much firmer - and no it’s not just that he doesn’t like my dad as much he’s literally obsessed with him he just knows it’s okay to go rougher