Many of you know my new cat, Casey, Immortalized here.
He has turned out to be a nice cat and pretty well-behaved except for a tendency to want to take a bite out of me. This is usually right when I get home and he’s fairly excitable then. He usually goes after my arms because he seems to be attracted to the motion.
Any ideas on how to rim of this habit through relatively gentle forms of negative reinforcement?
More cat toys?
I’m sure it’s just a love nip. I encourage them. It means the cat has accepted you as one of his own.
You immortalized him with a bad link?
Probably love-nips. One of my cats does the same thing – she’ll give a light bite, lick, bite, rub head, bite, lick again, etc. If I’ve just taken a bath, though, she’ll treat my arms like catnip and alternate attacking them full-force with trying to rub as much soap-residue as possible on herself.
Moved to IMHO.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
Cats can be pretty hard to change, and you may never have a cat who never, ever bites no matter what. But you can have a cat who bites only rarely.
First off, the negative. When he bites, immediately tell him ‘NO!’ or ‘No Biting!’ or something like that – it doesn’t matter what you say so much as that you do it in your ‘no’ voice – and withdraw from him. Put him down, step away, and refuse to socialize with him until he’s calmer. He’ll learn, over time, to connect the loss of scritches and snuggles with biting you, and may stop.
But the best thing for cats is not just to demand that they behave how you like them behaving, but that you also help them to behave better. Cats are creatures of habit, and will often persist in the bad habits even though they’re punished for it just because that’s how they always do things. So when you come home, pay attention to his reactions. Is there something he does before biting you? Does he shift the position of his ears, start lashing his tail, twist his head away? Do his pupils dialate? Is there something that YOU do (like maybe scratch his belly) that brings on the biting? If so, disengage from him a bit the moment that you recognize the “signs” in order to help him calm down and behave (but keep cooing over him so he knows you’re not mad), and/or stop doing whatever actions bring on the biting. This will help him to establish good habits, which will make it less likely that he’ll revert to the bad ones.
One of my cats is a biter, but with her, it’s not love nips so much as that she feels that she is the dominant female in the house, and she uses the bites as a gentle means of putting me (a less dominant female) in my place. Generally she does this when I persist in paying attention to her past the point where she has indicated through various subtle cat communications that she’s ready for me to stop.
The posts about “nibbles” or “love bites” may be the case with some cats, but if your guy bites hard, you’ve got to teach him one way or anoher not to. Or avoid him!
A few cats back we had one who really bit hard. Never scratched us, just really bit. We named him Jaws. 
My adult cats bite rarely, and that is only when they are over-stimulated, such as during play. I do have a kitten and she has not learned all the cat rules yet and will bite more often…I hiss at her, like another adult cat will do. She stops when I do that. You need to think like a cat!
As best as I can tell, Casey bites me because he thinks I’m some sort of moving target he needs to catch. It’s almost always on my hands or arms when they’re moving. I can see his eyes tracking me and then WHAM! he tries to bite me to stop me from moving away.
Bite him back. No really bite him back. I’ve done this to two or three cats and never had a problem with them again. I’m not talking about a hard bite, but enough to get them to jump a bit. I had one cat who every night would play bed mouse with me. It’s fun, but she used to bite me. So she did it and I grabbed her right away and bite her back. She never bite me again, she did still play bed mouse, but no more bitting.
My advice? Don’t die with that cat around.
Just tap him on the nose when he does that. Gently but firmly. He’ll stop. If a cat behaves badly directly to you, it’s ok to respond with negative reinforcement he’ll associate with you. If he behaves badly by, say, scratching furniture, you should apply negative reinforcement he won’t associate with you, like a squirt gun.
Re Askia’s point, I fully expect my cats to eat me if I die suddenly. How else will they survive?
Are you delicious?
Our Max the Younger is teething. He just lost one of his bottom eye teeth. He to nips and bites when he’s excited.
The NO voice works most of the time, but sometimes he requires the water spray to reinforce the NO.
After a squirt of water, he might come back and gently lay teeth on the same place, but no biting. Maybe that’s an apology, I don’t know.
I probably taste better than Iams.
We used to have a cat that loved to rough-house, including scratching and biting when playing or in response to being pet. I, personally, did not like this behavior, so as soon as she either bit me or scratched me, I said NO, and stopped playing with her or petting her. Hubby just accepted being scratched and bitten.
Within a few months and pretty much for the rest of the 12 years or so she lived with us, she stopped biting and scratching me, but would go after hubby on a regular basis.
They do learn how to behave if you enforce the rules consistently. It just takes a LONG time sometimes.
Install a cat door! Snoogums will go outside.
I just don’t understand cat people. 
Casey looks a lot like my Vir Catto, who also likes to bite when he gets excited. A loud “OW” when he bites too hard has mostly broken him of the habit.
That’s exactly like our house. After all, it’s manly to show that you can take a little biting and scratching. Not just too lazy to train cat. Right?