Split personality

Question
Hi Karen,

We are having some problems with my cat Boris. I found Boris on the street when he was a kitten (in May 2006) and he has been with us ever since. According to the vet he was born around 14/2/2006. We think that he is probably an Oriental, at least to a very large degree.

Our problem is that he keeps on attacking my legs and ankles. This in it self is not such a big problem but when you are getting up to go to the bathroom in  the middle of the night and have claws and teeth fully embedded in your bare legs, it gets tiresome.

I kid you not but it is almost like he has two separate personalities. One minute he is the sweetest wee thing coming up to sit on your lap and the next he ferociously attacking your legs (or any other part he can reach).

We have not seen any clear pattern to it but it does seem like he might do this when he is bored or does not get his way. He has been doing this since he was a kitten. We have been very careful not to reward the behavior in any way by feeding or playing with him immediately after it has happen.

We have tried every mechanism to discourage him, spray him with water, sharp noise, "NO", even blowing in his face and nothing works. As a matter of fact, it only increases the ferociousness of the attack.

He gets to spend a few hours outside every evening and has  trees and an huge bush area he roams around in. Sometimes he comes home absolutely exhausted and in these cases he just passes out on his bed and we do not see the behavior. We have tried to spend time playing with him so that he would have an outlet for his predatory behavior but this is no guarantee that Mr Hyde would not rear his ugly head.

Sometimes he attacks me when I tell him off for getting on the bench or on the table. He usually jumps off and then immediately attacks the person who told him off.

Any ideas on how to deal with this behavior, or just to discourage bad behavior in general, would be most appreciated.

TIA,
/Stefan

Answer
Hi Stefan,

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I had computer problems. Okay you have basically tried most of the solutions that are the tricks of the trade. Now onto the hard core stuff. You have what sounds like a real Jekyll and Hyde kitty. There are a couple of clues as to what is going on. It sounds like he has a real dominance problem going on. He goes outside and is most likely the top cat in his area. When he comes in you try to assert your dominance over him and he's not liking it. There are only two ways to deal with this. One is tough love. The other is drugs.

I have one cat here who is the top cat and he tried this with me a while back. I went thru the whole gamut just like you did. What I did was get a heavy leather glove and when he went after me I didn't back down and went right after him. He would hiss and attack me but my gloves would protect me. I would give him a couple of smacks until he backed down. This went on for a little bit until he realized that I wasn't backing away from him and was a lot bigger too. He now acts normally to me. Once in a while he will try to smack me but I smack him right back and he stops. This sounds a little harsh but it was the only thing that would work with him.

The one other thing you can try is to give him drugs to calm him down. If you do this you will have to keep him as an inside cat because letting him out like that would be asking for trouble for him. If you want to use the drug route write back and I'll tell you what to use. Good luck.

Ciao, Karen