Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/25/cat-wont-allow-young-human-to-climb-over-balcony.html
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Kitten, PLEASE.
Either that or the cat is being territorial. I had a cat that would do that to me when I had a loft bed in Brooklyn. He’d wack my hands (claws out) when I went up the ladder.
Also: parent taping this and letting cat do the job.
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My cat has a thing about attacking hands on bannisters. Some may tend to disassociate hands from rest of the person, the way audiences can disassociate puppets from puppeteers, and focus only on the spiderlike character of a human hand.
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I don’t think the cat in the video was being territorial. The gentle batting of the kid’s hands and blocking him by getting on the railing seems like protective behavior to me. When a cat is being territorial their paw boops are sharper and quicker, i know because my cat is an asshole when it comes to attention from people besides myself.
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This is something humans are, of course, largely blind to – though there are certain medications that can make you aware of it – but certain things about us are extremely freaky from the viewpoint of the animal kingdom. A human running or eating looks much like any other animal, but when they talk or do stuff with their hands, you really see the alien nature of the memetic parasite controlling them, I mean us.
It’s the same reason cats go for your hands when you try to type; nothing else in nature moves like that, and what it most resembles is arthropod movement.
Smol humans aren’t as purposeful but they’re still just really, like, busy. I was on a facetime call with my little niece and nephew earlier, where they were running around with the phone with me inside it, and I could really see how exhausting and stressful that could be for something like a cat.
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Eh, I don’t know whether it’s territorial or not, but my cat absolutely does that to hands on the stair railing. Or hands on a chair’s arms, for that matter.
I think that cats just like pretending that a hand on top of something is a mouse sitting on something.
I think this cat was playing.
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I would have thought that before I saw this (from 2014):
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Yeah yeah yeah, the cat is this or that cat is that. What about the person behind the effing camera?!! “Hmm…let’s just see where this goes.”
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I had a cat that did this as well. We’d often joke he trapped a hippy in the house when my roommate brought over one of his more granola friends, because my cat cornered him, a lot like this, and being a massive black cat, kept him cornered there by puffing up in a big threat display. We had to rescue the poor young man.
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This is what I saw – not a helpful cat, but a cat annoyed that someone was in up in its space.
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That is protective behavior; she’s going all Mama Cat on her oversized hairless kitten. Those are teaching or disciplinary swats. Our Alpha Cat was extremely protective of Kiddo as an infant and toddler. She treated Kiddo like her kitten, and she scaled her responses to Kiddo’s transgressions to her level of “ought to know better.” I am positive that one of the reasons Kiddo wasn’t a grabby toddler is because of our cat.
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