Frantically affectionate cat

[Hilary]

What do you do about a usually snuggly gentle kitty who sometimes just seems to go on a frenzy of “PET ME PET ME PET ME”. She won’t sit quietly, she dives on your hands, climbs on you, and unless I hide my hands (or put her on the floor 2 or 3 times) she gets more and more insistent about the attention.

She can also just sit on you and fall asleep, or sleep or play nearby but sometimes she just gets frantic about MORE - she wants me to pet her head or hold her like you would a baby and she’ll lean into your neck and purr. It’s very sweet, but it can be a bit much.

[Pleiad]

Sounds adorable. Can you try a distraction like throwing a toy or something? We had a cat who loved dressage whips. You flick the end around on the floor really fast and cat goes bonkers. Might give her something else to do. Or not.

[Emryss]

I’d go into a kitty lovefest, myself, but that’s because I cannot resist it. I had a cat like that for 19 years. I miss her still.

[Kat_the_Horse]

We have a cat who is also the antithesis of ‘aloof’. Doobie will snuggle, head bump, grab your hand, tap you endlessly to get your attention, and refuses to just lie down and ‘enjoy’ when you pet her. She is also a drooler and spit slinger, guaranteed to shower you with ‘affection’ after a moment of the gentlest petting.

No, I didn’t name her…my (then) teenaged daughter did as Doobie was her cat.

As she is over 8 years, I don’t see her calming down either. We just shield our faces and try to soothe her when we are able. Otherwise she eventually realizes she’s getting nowhere with one of us and will assault one of the other cats.

[mvp]

Y’all are in a game of Luv Poker. The only way to “win” (and have kitteh get out of your grill) is to see her bet and raise her one.

This is also called the “Be careful what you wish for, cat” training technique. It’s the one that works when you want to call a cat’s attention to a particular behavior and get kitteh to stop it.

In this case, when she wants love, you must pick her up and snuggle her hard until she says,

“Oh, wait a minute. Too much…… you freak. You need to dial it down. Who does that? I mean, I know I purr and head butt and drool and stuff, but you and your intense straight jacket-like snuggling. Maybe walking around while you do it, maybe flipping me over on my back and even kissing my belly, or hog tying all of my paws with one hand while you pet me all over…. yeah that stuff bordering on bondage? Yeah, that’s too much love. I’m going to think twice before calling you for another date. Let’s just be friends and keep it professional.”

The point is that CatHead must choose. But you get to set up the better- and worse options.

If you still want to date your cat but not have it get crazy each time, you just have to match her energy level. Whacky clingy earns whacky clingy. A casual meet up for coffee gets the same. At some point, you can decide to dial things up or down. Kitteh should follow your intensity level. The nice thing about your kind of cat is that when you do want to “get a room” with your cat, she’ll go there. Some can’t or won’t and those “meh, wallpaper” types aren’t as nice, IMO.

[ASBJumper]

It’s interesting to note that while most cat people will concede that male cats are generally more laidback, playful and interactive, so far all the people reporting this “pet me i’m in ECSTASY!!” phenomenon are referring to female cats.

My female cat is like this too. She is more shy and less social than my male cat, but she derives an almost disturbing amount of pleasure from being cuddled/stroked. She will stick her ass in the air and hold it there for 30 minutes if you have the energy to keep scritching the base of her tail… she will roll around in throes of pure ecstasy when you rub her belly and jump up and headbutt your hand when you go to pet her head. She drools all over the place and kneads the air, your leg, your arm, your face, anything.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say loving on her gave her some sort of kitty orgasm. :eek: :lol:

My male cat loves attention, but he just lies there and purrs. My female goes apesh*t about it and won’t.sit.still.

I say just enjoy it and if it becomes too much (sometimes I just can’t tolerate the copious amounts of drool on my bare arm and just have to put her down and go wash up), then just distract her, plunk her on the floor, or give her some catnip…

[ASBJumper]

@mvp;7362967

Y’all are in a game of Luv Poker. The only way to “win” (and have kitteh get out of your grill) is to see her bet and raise her one.

Tried this. If I go nuts and smother her, she will initially squirm and jump away from me, shake her head, sitdown and lick herself a few times, then turn around and jump right back on my lap or start rubbing against my legs again… it only works for about 5.3 seconds, then it’s back to the lovefest. LOL!! :lol:

[mvp]

[QUOTE=ASBJumper;7362981]
It’s interesting to note that while msot cat people will concede that male cats are generally more laidback, playful and interactive, so far all the people reporting this “pet me i’m in ECSTASY!!” phenomenon are referring to female cats.[/QUOTE]

IMO, this is a basic male/female animal difference, plus a basic feature of catness, minus the effects of spaying/neutering.

Someone needs to write out the statement in mathematical terms.

But here’s how it works.

1. Male/female. Mares, cats and women (especially Southern women) are the ones who keep the babies and culture alive. That’s day in, day out work. So what it takes to be an evolutionarily successful female in these species is diligence and presence of mind all.the.time. Males want what they want in a hedonistic way. That might be enough (or even necessary) to get them to want to jump anything with some untaken DNA. But the species and particular females (or really, her genes) won’t survive well if the ladies have such short-sighted kinds of pleasure. Don’t get me wrong, they like pleasure, but females need to keep one eye on survival all the time. No losing the house and the car during one bad weekend in Vegas, you know?

2. Catness. In addition to this, cats are nothing if not self-preserving. They are psychologically adults and our equals. They hang with us because it suits them, not because natural selection (or artificial selection) made them into the co-dependent little wusses that dogs are.

So layer Femaleness on Catness and you get an animal who pursues her interests with clarity and integrity. A male cat walks around and hopes he’ll find that $100 bill the street or he buys lottery tickets along with his smokes at the corner store. A female cat goes to business school.

3. Spaying/neutering. Theoretically, this minimizes the effects of male/femaleness in behavior and motivation. After all, you will see an intact, horn dog of a tom cat really exert himself to get a date. There are probably sexually voracious female cats out there, too. But I don’t think that with complex behaviors or things that look like basic, fixed bits of psychology-- cat identity if you will-- altering them changes that. The answer to the basic existential questions “Who am I and am I solely responsible for my survival?” has been selected for over time. Just cutting out a uterus (and it’s a relatively recent change in cats’ evolution) isn’t going to change that answer.

In sum, that’s why your female cat is so much more ambitious about getting affection.

[Hilary]

Ha - I know it’s a TERRIBLE problem to have… - the cat you likes you too much! Love your theory mvp about the why -

it definitely happens more after I’ve been away at work, and sometimes I do just pick her up and cuddle her until she chills a little and then she’s ok. She just loves people and attention - fortunately she doesn’t drool!

She’s a good little hunter too. For a stray I lucked out!

[mvp]

[QUOTE=ASBJumper;7362990]
Tried this. If I go nuts and smother her, she will initially squirm and jump away from me, shake her head, sitdown and lick herself a few times, then turn around and jump right back on my lap or start rubbing against my legs again… it only works for about 5.3 seconds, then it’s back to the lovefest. LOL!! :lol:[/QUOTE]

You didn’t hold her long enough.

The cat has to have time to “replay the tape in her mind” and figure out what she did to earn her entrapment. This is part of the reason that the cat has to be held still. Cat doesn’t have enough brain cells to do any self-searching or remorse if it’s moving.

If you don’t wait long enough and kitteh comes back for more, make a big move like you are going to trap her and love her to death again and let her figure out that she doesn’t want that.

What your cat is doing when she jumps away from you, shakes her head and licks herself is saying “Whoa, that was a close one. Almost smothered to death. Oh well, clearly I’m one of God’s elect and He spared me. I don’t have to change.”

The head shaking is annoyance and the licking is self-soothing. Your cat isn’t that scared. If she were, she’d run and hide, not merely take a valium at a safe distance from you. But! What you cat is learning (or reconfirming) is that she gets to control her emotional thermostat. So when she wants crazy luv, she goes and gets it. When she wants distance, she goes and gets that. You are her tool, though a favorite one. When you force a cat to chill and think in a situation she doesn’t like and can’t control, then you start to make a difference. Unable to change her world by moving, cat must change her world by changing her mind.

Time three: You approach her and turn off the love at will, or before she gets riled up and thinks you were lying the first two times.

You’ll get there.

[Epona142]

Yup I have one. A female.

The funny thing is she doesn’t even like me that much. She is my husband’s cat. Generally she avoids me because I’m the one who dishes our “punishment” via the squirt bottle for doing naughty deeds.

But once in a while, she will get on my desk and then proceed to THROW herself at me over and over for petting and love. I generally pet her until she grows tired of it and leaves.

[mvp]

[QUOTE=Hilary;7363252]
it definitely happens more after I’ve been away at work, and sometimes I do just pick her up and cuddle her until she chills a little and then she’s ok. She just loves people and attention - fortunately she doesn’t drool!

She’s a good little hunter too. For a stray I lucked out![/QUOTE]

Your cat is a totally rational and git-r-done animal.

That she hunts fits with the picture. This is a cat who knows what she wants and will take risks to go get it. She is honest/intense about loving and killing.

I’m learning a lot about this kind of cat from a new foster I have. Folks at the shelter thought she was depressed because she was curled up all the time in her cage…… which was on the bottom row in a quiet room.

The cat very quickly spread her wings at my house. In 4 hours she was on my bed and she slept under the covers that first night. Then, in the next couple of days, she tried to boss me around about where/when I could touch her. I spent a day or so after that getting her on the same page about which of us is the other’s b!tch. Now she’s a player and a cuddler and a drooler.

The drooling is the height of happiness…. and I haven’t had the cat for a week. Plus another (more shy) one arrived on the same day. The so-called depressed female shouldn’t have been able to spread her wings plus accept all this pressure from me.

The moral of the story? Catness was taking really good care of herself and doing the “When in Rome” thing:

When in a cage near the ground not getting the time of day from anyone, she lowered her expectations accordingly. She collapsed her wings so as to psychologically cope. She had been there 3 months. Note that human babies left this way in, say, large orphanages can’t do this. They die or don’t develop from that neglect.

When invited to have an opinion, CatThing revealed it.

When told that I’d dig her, but had some demands, she was smart enough and secure enough to weigh her options negotiate “stay in the relationship” by deciding to be mentally flexible enough to accept the fact that with the kinds of attention that she did like, she’d also get the occasional snuggle or drag that she didn’t choose.

[Highflyer]

Mine is male. And sometimes the only thing that works is turning on the vacuum. It’s mean but it buys me 10-15 minutes of peace to do things that require two hands ans a cathair free surface.