Kittens are super cute and adorable, but you must know how to get your kitten to stop biting. Because our toes and hands are their favorite biting spot. It may look harmless now but can grow into something dangerous.
It’s funny to say they are so small, yet; they drag you to the point where you need ways for your kitten to stop biting. Kittens might develop a habit of doing so if they are not controlled, or they might be suffering from underlying health issues, and biting must be a way to let you know!
Whatever is the case, you need to prevent them from doing so! Let’s dig deeper into this issue with eight amazing ways to control your kitten from biting.
How to Stop a Kitten from Biting?
Following are 11 proven worldwide ways to help your kitten from excessive biting issues, which will help their owners eventually. So let’s hop on to them.
1. Transfer Your Kittens Playful Energy on Toys
Any kittens favorite spot for biting is none other than your hands and toes, well, every kitty owner must have discovered that till now! This satisfies one of their natural hunting instinct which is pouncing, biting, and chasing. But that’s not an ethical way to fulfill your cat’s need!
We have a variety of toys available for that.
Get your kitty toys that satisfy her hunting needs so that she will spare your toes and hands from partially ripping off!
2. Avoid Biting Behaviors of Your Kitten
Even if it hurts very little to have cute little kittens’ teeth around your body parts, that doesn’t mean you will let her do so!
By allowing this, you are encouraging her for such biting behaviors. You need to stop that asap! For composition, you can give her kitten/cat interactive toys.
Twenty minutes of playtime with your kitty is a must for bonding well with her, from which you can shift her major focus to other toys instead of your toes and hands, which are her favorite biting spots.
3. Make Sure Your Kitten Is Healthy
A kitten biting your hands and toes is quite common till some point, but if you are witnessing such patterns frequently, then there must have been some other reasons, which can be underlying health issues!
Kitties that are sick often shy away from human contact or act aggressively, which includes biting in excessive amounts.
So you need to determine the actions of your kittens and decide what’s normal and what is not.
4. Compose a Calm Environment for Your Kitten
Not only humans but kittens, too, are cursed with anxiety and stress. In fact, one of the common issues in cats. If you are facing difficulties in creating a stress-free environment for kittens, you can take the help of kitten calming sprays, which are no doubt safe for them.
They are not only helpful in eliminating stress but also improves bad behaviors in kittens as well as cats.
5. Leave her alone
While dogs are someone who might just spend their whole day waiting for you to get back from work, cats are completely the opposite, they will resume back to their imaginary missions as soon as you leave them, without even kissing you a goodbye! Well, that’s moody cats for you!
The truth is, kittens are moody by nature, and they need their space if you will spend the whole day carrying them around the house just because they are cute and light-weighted! Big no! Cats won’t appreciate that.
They need their room or place where they can evolve. This is necessary for their development, a cat who is irritated will bite or hiss more at you, eventually will develop this pattern!
So, leave your kitten alone for a particular time of the day, and she will love you more!
6. Playtime Is a Must for Kittens
We all know how important it is for a kitten to have playtime, and if you don’t, you need to witness numerous articles on how important playtime is to kittens/cats’ health.
Being natural hunters, kittens are always going to bite, chew, and pounce on objects or humans whenever they get the chance.
There are many kitten toys available on the market to support the playful nature and hunting instinct.
If you don’t want to consider toys as a good idea for kittens, you can take out 30 minutes from your daily routine, to play with her.
This will fulfill her hunting needs with that it will also make her tired enough to give it a rest. Other than that, playtime is useful in motivating exercise, stress/anxiety relief, eliminate boredom, assist with behavior issues, and lastly increase your bond of affection with them.
7. Clap Your Hands to Scold Your Kittens with a Firm No
Kittens are unlike pups in understanding major emotions of humans, in short cats won’t understand when you are angry or sad due to them, they only understand actions and food!
To make your commands reachable, you can use your hands, just clap whenever she’s trying to bite you, this will take time but soon, the message will reach her that clapping intends no!
8. Be Gentle with Your Kitten
It’s fair enough to get frustrated at times or even cry in the corner when your kittens are being too much of a mess.
But never forget that they are innocent creatures at the end of the whom you love to every bit! Always be gentle on them, never try to punish, hit, or screen them.
This might develop behavior issues in them, on top of that, they won’t even understand that why my human is making weird faces. So it’s a big no! To use such patterns on your kittens.
9. Bring a New Member Home
Many times when we adopt a kitty or any pet animal, we might just deprive them of their natural habit in which they had other cats to play with!
Stalking, pouncing, and biting is major needs for any kitten’s overall muscular development.
You might want to bring a new member at home to support her playfulness. Which will eliminate your hands and toes in being practice for your kitten biting habits, she will divert all her focus to her new playmate.
This might seem like a fancy opinion, but it will help to deal with such issues of your pet and in order for her to be a healthy cat, the pet owner should consider all the possible options! Plus, two cats are better than one!
10. Check for Behavior Issues
Kittens can’t speak, but they have their own language of giving signals.
Now, this might seem like a task, but it is not! Did you know that Kitty indicates their fondness by Purring, trills, meows, and chirps, Had you ever thought of how they indicate pain?
Biting your hands or toes can be an outcome of the pain your cat is experiencing!
What can you do about it? To determine this, you need to pet her on various spots, if she is yowling, turning, and biting, that means she is having pain. The next step would be no home remedy, but visiting your vet!
11. Reward the Good Behavior of Your Kitten
Kittens in their growing up phase required a lot of attention and care because it is going to determine their behavior pattern in the later period of life.
It is very important to reward the good behavior of your kittens as well as the bad.
When you allow your kitten to bite your figures or toes, thinking that it is completely fine as long as you are not hurt, stop there as it requires a strong no! There are various ways to punish your naughty feline.
When it comes to rewarding, you might catch yourself thinking harder! Let’s look into the easy and effective ways of doing it right :
Find out what your kittens loves the most, mostly they do not really care of being a good or bad girl, like our innocent dogs! All they care about is food! So if it’s tuna, or a piece of meat, discover a good ”treat” for her.
In the initial stage, you need to reward your kitten with things like a small piece of meat, as soon as she learns not to take your finger in mouth.
You might discover that your kitten might or might not respond to the treats sometimes, it’s trial and error always in the beginnings, so never lose hope!
Every time when your kitten listens to you after you pull your hands or toes out of her mouth, scratch her head and say ” that’s like my good girl” give her a treat. This will stimulate the message faster in your kittens brain.
Arrange these kittens training/play sessions before the meal time, being hungry will drag more out of her than being full! And no we are not telling you to be cruel, make sure this doesn’t last for more than fifteen minutes!
Cats need immediate rewards as their attention span is shorter, give her your toe and when she refuse to take it, reward her right away! If you take time in rewarding, then she might just not understand why is she getting yummy treats when it’s not even lunchtime!
Note: please don’t try to punish your kitty in any way! This will only make her fearful, and later she might grow into a cat with behavior issues!
Conclusion
You may not be the first one or one of the few kitten owners who desperately need to know how to get your kitten to stop biting. It is necessary to take action on such behavior of our kittens or else they might develop a habit of it which can be harmful to them in the longer run.
You need to determine the normal biting and unusual biting, of your kitten, after that only you can take appropriate actions. Whatever you choose in treating your kitten’s biting behavior, make you teach your kitten in gentle ways, strictly avoid scolding and punishments.
References
- How to Get Kittens Not to Bite You – Kitten Lady
- Teach your kitten how to play nice – The Humane Society of the United States
- Cat and Dog Bites – American Academy of Family Physicians