Aggressive Cat Behavior: How To Stop Your Cat From Attacking Other Animals

Your cat can show several different forms of aggressive behavior. Although these behaviors may be alright and even useful in the wild, in a housecat these behaviors are disfunctional. Animal behaviorists classify different kinds of aggressive cat behavior differently. When your cat attacks a bird or mouse in the garden, or even your son's pet hamster in its cage, this is called predatory aggression. Kitty is playing great white hunter, following its instinct to hunt for prey. Unfortunately, you cannot just shut down this instinct, so other measures need to be taken. The simplest one it to put a collar with a bell on your cat to keep it from sneaking up on its prey.
Kitty can also behave aggressively when it is afraid. At first, this seems like a paradox. But you may better understand this behavior if you recall the human fight-or-flight instinct. When your cat is afraid of some other animal, like your pet dog, but cannot run away, it may go nuts and attack the source of its fear in a berserk fury of claws, fang and fur. So, what to do? The natural reaction of most cat lovers is to try to pet and console kitty. Unfortunately, in the long run, you are conditioning your cat to behave this way. You are reinforcing the idea that it is okay to behave aggressively whenever it is afraid. Generally, the best way to handle fear aggression is to remove the source of the fear, then ignore kitty. Yes, pay no more attention to your cat until it calms down on its own.
The third form of aggressive cat behavior has to do with territory. This is especially common in unneutered tomcats. In this case, kitty will attack your new cat because it feels that the newcomer is invading its territory. This is yet another natural behavior which can give you a big headache. If this happens, you need to introduce the two cats to each other slowly. Mealtime is usually an important part of this process. In simplistic terms, both cats only see each other when it is time to eat. Otherwise, they are kept apart, out of sight of each other. This lets them associate the other cat with the pleasure of eating.
Another form of aggressive cat behavior is called maternal aggression or protective aggression. This is just a fancy name for when mama cat attacks anyone who approaches her new kittens. Unfortunately, there is not much you can do here. Just be patient, and eventually mama cat may let you play with her kittens.
Generally speaking, aggressive cat behavior is driven by a cat's natural instinct for food, territory, fear or protectiveness. The first step of treatment is to identify the trigger for this aggression. After that the specific approach varies. Regardless, love and patience is a must.
By: Katherin Towers
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