My Cat is Stripping my Flesh from my Bones!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

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?

2

Yes. I’ve lived with a couple of weirdo cats that I was a little afraid to make too happy. My best kitty ever, Zelda, used to groom my eyebrows and hair. When she’d really get into it she’d bite. She never broke skin, but I always though it was extreme love. The other thing she did that I thought was strange as all get out (this may be TMI) was to sniff and lick my used underware while I was in the shower.

3

One of my cats did that, too - she rolled in it, which led to an amusing situation where she was wandering around the house with a pair of my undies round her neck… I never laughed so hard in my life.

One of the 3 cats I have now constantly grooms me and licks my hands, arms and whatever else she can reach. I have read that that’s the kitty way to say “you belong to my family”.

4

I was wondering about the licking thing because my orange tabby does this to me all the time. None of my other cats did it to the extent that he does. I have to move my hands out of his reach sometimes to stop him from licking me raw.

Which leads to the somewhat strange scene of me sitting in front of the tv with my arms over my head.