Does anybody else’s cat do this? Can anyone explain it?
I’ve got a wonderful book called Family Words, about the words and phrases families use among themselves. One family came up with the word “feksh” to describe extreme affection expressed in bizarre ways: “You look so good I could eat you up!”
My cat has Fehsh really bad.
Sometimes, when she gets carried away and overly-affectionate, she changes from nuzzlibng to love bites to a weird behavior that I call “stripping the flesh from my bones”. She only does it if I’m wearing a long-sleeved shirt, never on bare skin. She bites a mouthful of shirt and forearm skin. (If she doesn’t get any forearm skin, she’ll let go and bite again until she does.) Then she’ll pull away until the pinched-up forearm skin slips out of her grip, leaving her with a mouthful of bunched-up shirt sleeve. She’ll then rapidly pull this away, with a slight twist. Then she’ll let go and start over again. The only thing I can think of is that it looks as if she’s trying to use the time-honored Cat methof of peeling away muscle tissue from the bones. It seems like an extension (beyond Love Bites) of “I’m so happy I could eat you up!”, although in a pretty extreme form. It hurts a bit, too, but it’s no worse that pinching (My cat almost never breaks the skin, in anything she does.).
Anybody else know about this? Do your cats do it? Or anything weirder?