Self-harm in cats is often a displacement activity. This is a complicated topic because even the experts don’t really have a handle on it and it often concerns mental health. In the same way that self-harming in people concerns mental health. I believe that there is a distinct overlap between self-harming in people and …
Here’s the deal: you can’t answer the question in the title in an article on the Internet. The problem is too deep and too complicated to do that. The answer depends upon observing the cat and looking at the conditions under which they behave and the circumstances of their self-mutilation plus medical diagnosis. And …
I’ve just bumped into another reason why a domestic cat might attack their own tail. We see a lot of this but it is normally in play. It’s just chasing their tail but if they end up biting their tail hard and even, God forbid, going further and biting off the tip of their …
This is a picture from the Cuyahoga Falls Veterinary Clinic published here with their permission. Although the title to this article is about a picture of a cat suffering from feline hyperesthesia it is a picture, in fact, of self-mutilation which is a symptom or consequence of this mystifying disease. I think it has …
Domestic cat scratch themselves for the same reason that we scratch ourselves: to relieve an itch. Before I explain some reasons for itchiness in domestic cats there are two aspects which are noteworthy, (1) cats sometime scratch themselves far too much because they don’t rationalise the fact that they are hurting themselves with their …
