The viewers of this video think that it is funny. I don’t know why. I suppose they think that the woman is getting her comeuppance as she confidently pouts before her smartphone in one of those typical selfies whereupon her cat shatters the fantasy with a sharp slap to her left cheek with claws out. I say with claws out because as far as I can see the claws are out. And in any case under these circumstances, in my experience, cats normally elongate their claws. If I’m correct then there will be a nasty scratch on this woman’s left cheek which is no laughing matter because she will not be taking selfies of herself for a while!

The big question is why did the cat do this. You can see that the cat is almost treating the woman as prey. She approaches the woman’s head gingerly as if uncertain and then sniffs the air around her face. This would have identified the person as the cat’s owner if she is the owner. It would have been scent with which the cat was familiar. Therefore, I’m surprised that the cat slapped. There appears to be no provocation..

Sometimes under certain circumstances domestic cats can forget their domestication and return to the wild and even regard their owner as a hostile creature to be attacked. But in this instance they are at home, indoors and I don’t think the attack was because this cat reverted to the wild. I think the attack is because the woman is not the cat’s owner but a stranger in the house. The cat sniffs the person, recognises her as a stranger in the house and attacks her with a nasty slap and scratch. That’s my theory. Do you have one?

An alternative scenario is that the woman in the video is the cat’s owner and just before the video there was a hostile interaction (or play interaction) between cat and woman (from the cat’s perspective) which provoked the cat or wound up the cat leading to this aggressive slap. It looks genuinely aggressive as opposed to boisterous play.

The Daily Mail online says that the person in the video is the cat’s owner. That may be the case in which case my theory is incorrect but the newspaper does not provide any evidence or details about that. For me, the evidence points to the fact that this young woman is not the owner.

Please note by the way that this video may be removed by YouTube. The video appears to have been stolen by which I mean downloaded against copyright and then uploaded under the name of a different account. That can lead to removal of the video.