I’ve had pet dogs and cats (strays) that when I’ve hit them (lightly), accidently or because they did something wrong, they’ve instinctively turned to bite with an open mouth, stopped and looked at me straight in the eye before stopping and have an “Oops, better not do that!” look.
Is it out of love, fear, respect? Something else?
Do other animals do that? The only other pets I’ve had were rabbits and sometimes they’d nibble on my finger, but stop before biting hard.
Most of the time my cats open their mouths as if to bite, they’re playing. The other times, it seems like the teeth are just a warning. If they want to bite and don’t, I’d venture a guess that it’s from “respect,” whatever that means to a cat. The humans are typically in charge of things, and you don’t want to alienate the boss (food source).
When we had dogs, the only times they ever bared their teeth, they seemed immediately mortified that they’d done that. In their cases, it seemed more like a reaction of love mixed with… not fear, exactly, but something like awe.
Pretty much. Or they’ve mellowed to the point where conditioned behavior can overcome instinct. Biting is recognized to be unrewarding.
The cat is saying, “Next time human, I will rip out your throat!”
I imagine they realize you are the guy who puts food in the bowl.
Dennis bit me when I extracted him from a cat fight. He didn’t see me, and probably thought another cat had snuck up behind him. Felt like I was hit with a hammer.
Liable to depend on the cat/dog; but that straight in the eye look with bared teeth might mean, “I’m not going to bite you this time, but watch it, buster.”
Or it might mean “You’re scaring me, and I’m prepared to defend myself if I think you’re going to do that again.”
A direct look in the eye is either aggression, fear, or intimacy. Intimacy seems unlikely in that situation.
What positions were the ears and tail and fur in?
My cat doesn’t bite me out of love, fear, and respect, and he also bites me out of love, fear, and respect.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
I’m more familiar with dogs than cats, but most of the time an open mouth with teeth bared does not mean the animal is about to bite. As others have said, most of the time dogs don’t bite, or if they do it’s not an aggressive bite. It’s a warning, a signal, and message. It’s your dog’s way of communicating what is going on.
Apparently, kittens learn to moderate their aggression by playing with each other. If a cat grows up without other cats around, they won’t figure out how rough they should get when they’re “just playing”, as opposed to actually attacking prey. And so you get biting behavior.
I have a kitten (and his momma). Ricky, the baby, bit my finger once and drew blood. Now, the only time he “bites” is when he’ll nibble on my fingers in the morning to get me awake (if he’s not purring in my ear). It’s very gentle.
I guess this is sort of the inverse of the OP, but it leads me to conclude that cats don’t bite when they’ve learned healthier outlets for play and affection, and, of course, don’t consider you prey.
That may not explain why my one cat who bites grew up on a couple of dairy farms well supplied with other kittens and cats. (And, as I’ve learned to expect from cats who didn’t grow up solo, is still very social, with both cats and dogs.)
He doesn’t bite all that hard – I’ve been bit by a cat who meant it and I can tell the difference, these are love bites – but he did draw blood on me a couple of times. He’s gradually getting better about it.
I suspect those other kittens and cats all had good thick fur coats to blunt the effect.
But I don’t think the behavior described in the OP has to do with playing too rough. I think, as I said earlier, that it’s a warning signal, either out of fear or anger; and that they don’t actually bite because the OP is no longer acting threatening, so they’re not afraid enough or angry enough to bite – they probably think that the warning signal worked.
Thank you everyone for your replies.
I think some of you misunderstand my scenario. This isn’t a show of a aggression. This is a knee jerk, I’m going to bite you! And stopping a split second and millimeters away from puncturing the skin. Like stopping a punch an inch away from someone’s face because you realize you better stop.
The last time was a stray cat that was obviously able to defend himself because I’d seen tuffs of hair missing at times. He was laying beside me outside, may have been sleeping and I accidently pushed him from behind. He immediately swiveled his head, was ready to chomp down, then stopped, opened his mouth and stared at me, embarrassed? It wasn’t the usual, “I meant to do that!” cat look. LOL!
Anecdotal only:
With my dogs and cats I would say “Ow!” when they would play bite and then stop playing with them.
Simple as that. They all learned to not bite (in general…they use their mouths for a lot of things but that “Ow” would always work and they’d back off and seem a little chagrined). If they did bite it was an accident and seemed a little upset it happened (more the dog than the cats but even the cats responded similarly).
Clearly they didn’t mean to cause damage by biting in my case. Just playing and it got a little aggressive. I think the no biting was love/respect. They clearly never intended real harm.
You’re doing right thing according to the experts. I saw on a show that’s how puppies and kittens communicate to each other that they’re playing too hard.
My nephew’s dog would purposely slowly bite my hand and slowly put additional pressure as if trying to elicit a response. I never said anything and would stop playing. Not saying I did the right thing, but he finally stopped when one day I took his paw, put it in my mouth and slowly bit down until he yelped. He never play bit my hand again.
Our cat, Carmine, was an easygoing and friendly Maine coon who knew how to set limits.
One time I was brushing his fur and removing clots. He bore up splendidly for awhile, then took my hand between his teeth with great gentleness.
“That’s quite enough for now, thank you.”
I took the hint.
What makes you think that this isn’t a basic show of aggression? It’s easy to anthropomorphize our pets but they really don’t function with the same set of emotions and instincts as humans.
True, but IMHO, only to a point.
Cats seem to run in a range of modes, and their entire personality can switch with mode. Cats bite when they are hunting, fighting or mating. The latter is an interesting one, as there is a clear example of biting without injuring.
Desmond Morris wrote on cats (as well as humans) and had a whole raft of explanations of cat behaviour. Some of them might even be true. He suggested that domestic cats lived in a state of arrested development. In particular that they live in a twilight world where they are both your kitten and your mother. Behaviour flips about between these relationships.
A friend of mine relates how one of her cats got a bit too agitated when being stroked/hair de-clumped. The critter turned and bit down on her finger. It paused, looked at her, and then sank an incisor right into her finger nail drawing blood (with much swearing and general bad times.) It never did it again. But my friend said the expression on the critter’s face gave the impression it was quite aware of what it was about to do.
I tend to be a bit ambivalent about the question of anthropomorphising what our pets do. It is easy to claim we are a much higher being with vastly more complicated reasons. But we are really only a few steps away from our pets in evolution. There are only so many ways things will evolve. We have little clue where our more basic drives come from. We do not make a good case for well reasoned actions for a great deal of things we do in life. Rather than prohibiting anthropomorphising our pet critters, I might ask for reasons why we should not be regarding ourselves as operating with much the same drives. We just graft a chatty box on top and think we are especially clever. We should perhaps be crittermorphising ourselves a bit more.
Humans can do some really stupid and antisocial things when riled up. When the red mist descends and reason flies, there we might see the parallels with our riled up critter friends. The trick for us is to have reason enough avoid going there. But we kid ourselves that we can’t.
It is what is called “bite inhibition”. Social animals learn – and it is a learned behavior – how to both play and threaten without contact. They learn from their siblings and from adults in the pack, by getting a bad reaction (a sibling might yipe and not play any more; an adult may snarl and pin the pup to the ground and scare it).
Predator species need to learn this very early as they are equipped to damage, and getting hurt might mean starvation. If a dog snaps or threatens but doesn’t bite, it is because he never meant to. Dog bites happen in a split second and they are dead accurate.
No need to assign some abstract impulse to it; is simply communication. What an animal is saying with a threat is “I do not like what you are doing, but you are a member of my pack and I will not hurt you.”
The above applies to dogs. I don’t know shit about cats.
I think this is true for cats, too. As I mentioned upthread, I have a kitten and her mom. Occasionally, when they’ve played, I’ve seen Momma hiss and smack her son. I have little doubt that she’s correcting him. There is a difference between interacting with the pack and interacting with threats or prey, and animals teach each other this distinction.
OK, that one I can explain. He was touched from behind while sleeping, and had no idea who had touched him or why. The intelligent feral cat doesn’t survive by slow reactions: he woke instantly ready to defend himself – but as soon as he turned his head, he realized that it was you who had touched him, and he knows you as someone who he’s got in the category of at least a casual friend. So as soon as he realized it was you, he knew that he didn’t want to bite you.
He might have been a bit embarrassed at having been about to bite a friend. I think cats do have that emotion, or at least something like it; but am not sure whether they’d have it in that situation.
That’s the technique that’s gradually working on my current bitey cat. “OUCH” and the patting stops and the cat, if being held, gets put down. (On the floor/ground, not by the vet!)
Yes, indeed.
Cats and dogs are not humans. It’s a mistake to think they are, or to treat them exactly like humans. But they’re not entirely unrelated beings who we have nothing in common with, either. The behaviors and emotions that mammals have evolved to deal with each other have a great deal in common among us (and among a lot of other creatures, for that matter.)
You do need to learn to read the specific species’ signals. (Dogs do their best to read ours, and have gotten quite good at it. Cats expect you to learn Cat, and most humans are terrible at it – even the best are handicapped in speaking it, because we have no tails and can’t move our ears or fur right.) A head butt from a cat means ‘Hi there! Pat me!’ [ETA: It also means “You are a member of my group and I’m getting my scent on you.”] The same gesture from a goat means ‘Get the hell away from me!’ The polite greeting in Dog is a nose in the ass; they need to be taught that that’s rude in Human. – I’ve seen a cat and a dog both wanting to play with each other but both confused by the other’s signals; the cat didn’t recognize a play bow, the dog didn’t recognize the invitational roll. (And that last can be tricky for anyone not well used to cats, because there’s also a defensive roll, which is a very similar body position but again, watch the ears, tail, and fur. And remember that the invitational roll may be an invitation to a game involving a play level of use of claws and teeth – you have to know the individual cat.)
But the thing is – we’re all social mammals who are capable of doing damage to each other. We all have signals about how to play with each other without doing so. We all also have defensive and aggressive instincts, and signals that exhibit those. And the underlying emotions are most likely pretty much the same.
Pretty similar with cats; though cats may be more likely to use a light scratch or bite even when they wouldn’t use a full-force one. Cats also tend to use both of those in playing with each other more than most dogs do.
– My sister had a cat who never liked me. I sometimes gave in to the temptation to sneak in a quick pat on her, when given the chance (she was clearly not afraid of me.) One time I did that, and she sat up on her haunches, looked at me, reached over with one paw, and pulled my hand over to her.
I thought ‘Oh good! I’ve finally won her over, she wants more patting!’ – because I’ve had cats who would do that when they wanted to be patted.
– and then she took her other front paw and, very deliberately, while looking straight at me and holding my hand with one paw, whacked my hand with the other; minimal claws, but quite a hard whack.
I think that was the last time I tried to land an uninvited pat on that cat. She didn’t hurt me; but she had made her point very clear.
Thank your for the explanation. I understand and agreed that it was an instinctual reaction. I’ve had it happen with my dogs who with me literally from birth to to their passing and they’ve given me that look of “Oh…it’s you! Sorry!”.
I didn’t share this story because the dog belonged to a VIP, that I can’t disclose. I used to watch this person’s dog and he and I got along very well because of that. Twice during a walk, he snatched up something he shouldn’t have, first time a chicken bone and the second time a baby bird trapped under a sprinkler. I fought with him trying to get his mouth open, yes I know I’d never win against a hungry dog, and he growled at me exposing his teeth. Both times he quickly snapped at my hand, having it fully in his mouth, making several snaps, but not fully biting down. I got several shallows cuts on my hand from pulling it out.
Once the incidents were over, it was if nothing happened. His master scolded the dog, saying to look at my hand and had a look of guilt. The next day in both incidents, we were best pals as always.
I’m 100% sure if I didn’t pull my hand out of his mouth, he wouldn’t have fully bit down.
Interesting about dog bites happening in a split second. My boss was bitten on the leg by a dog she never met before. The dog was with a friend of her neighbor and she had stopped to chat. She said the dog showed no aggression at all, but just bit her without notice or provocation.