Cat’s while lovable creatures can have the most annoying and even harmful behaviours, such as biting.  There are a number of reasons cats bite but how do you stop cats biting you and your furniture.

Depending on why your cat is biting will influence how you start to deal with this annoying behaviour.

If your cat is still a kitten chances are they haven’t learnt wrong from right yet.  So you need to teach them. You can either use positive reinforcement to reward their good behaviour or punishment to get them to stop the biting behaviour.  Sometimes it easier to punish bad behaviour as it will be clear to the cat that if they bite they will be punished. In this scenario you cat is being punished for particular behaviour instead of being rewarded for general good behaviour.  However positive reinforcement has an important place in training your cat, and it works particularly well for getting them to learn new behaviours as opposed to getting them to stop bad behaviours.

Kitten’s also go through a teething phase just like babies and need something to bit down on. These teething toys can help and you can read a blog post about them here: Teething Cat Toys.

If your cat is older and has just started biting and become bad tempered, check if they are off their food, if they are chances are unwell and you’d be grumpy if you felt ill too.  Keep a close eye on them and take them to the vets if they don’t seem to be getting any better.  Once they’re better their biting should stop if it doesn’t you may need to remind them that their biting behaviour is not acceptable.

If you’ve got a grown up cat who bites and they don’t seem to be ill or stressed out by their environment for example after a house move, then it’s time to start retraining them.  There are a number of ways you can do this to stop your cats from biting.

My favourite and this works well for cats who demand a lot of attention from you is to withdraw attention when then begin to bite, remove them from your knee and ignore their demands for a stroke.  Eventually they will work out that biting gets them less attention and will gradually stop your cats from biting.  This however must be kept up, if you allow your cat to bite you on occasion, then you’re sending them mixed signals.

If your cat is biting because they are bad tempered, use a rolled up newspaper or magazine and bang it down on something hard so it makes a big bang, do not hit your cat with it! This is generally enough to make your them stop biting and will distract it, hopefully making them associate their biting behaviour with the loud and unpleasant noise.  I used this method to get my youngest cat to stop climbing our curtains.

Sometimes your cats will bite just because they want something to clean their teeth on or wear them down, if this is the case make sure that they have new toys to play with and specifically designed dental biscuits which are hard and satisfying crunchy for your cats.

Hopefully this will start to help you understand and help stop your cats biting but if you’re interested on learning how you can get your cat behaviour better in other areas too, I recommend this book, it’s helped me a lot, hopefully it will be something you refer back to over and over again.

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