Is It Normal For Kittens To Bite Your Hands

Redirect the kitten s attention often playful biting of hands or feet occurs simply because your cat is bored and is looking for a play object.

Is it normal for kittens to bite your hands. Biting and mouthing is a normal behavior in kittens. For kittens that really go after your hands some behaviorist recommend using a foul tasting additive such as a commercial product called bitter apple or even tabasco sauce. Fully grown adult cats though can do serious damage to property and people when they gnaw and bite. Because cats mouth and paw objects to explore their world it s natural for them to bite.

Biting is a totally acceptable behavior for a kitten but that doesn t mean we want them attacking our hands or bare feet. A young kitten will pounce chase stalk wrestle bite and scratch its siblings and mother. Beginning around 4 weeks of age kittens will start visually track objects that look like prey and practice their pounce. However normal exploration and kitten games can turn into a cat biting problem.

Kittens start losing their baby teeth around 9 weeks of age and from that time until their adult teeth are fully grown in at 5 to 6 months you can count on lots of chewing action. This is all normal behavior for a kitten. Cats are a predator species so it s perfectly normal for kittens to express their natural instinct to attack chomp and gnaw. So it s up to you as a kitten owner to train your little furry friend not to continue this potentially destructive and dangerous behavior.

Kittens bite for many reasons. But luckily for you and your fingers kitten biting naturally decreases as your cat ages and usually disappears by 12 months of age she adds. If your kitten won t stop biting you need to set limits and learn effective methods for training such as clicker training for kittens. These are nontoxic for cats but they taste terrible.

This is the time when each kitten learns how to use an inhibited bite so as not to. It turns out that kitten biting is part of the play behavior kittens learn when they are with their littermates. After one or two licks or bites kittens often learn that biting is not all that fun. But kitties can learn to inhibit the force of their bites and to use soft paws without claws.

Da bird or other teaser toys are a great choice. Give your kitten 15 minutes of active play several times a day with an interactive toy. Kittens bite because they re teething which happens when they re 2 weeks old and then again around 4 months she says. How to get kittens not to bite you.