Agent Jazzy

Okay so recently my darling angel cat son Ollie has been giving me signals that I have LEARNED means his natural young predator instincts are kicking in and he’s inviting me to play-wrestle, and over the last couple days I’ve been figuring how to go about stimulating these instincts without encouraging spontaneous violence, yeah?

So I’ve slowly started communicating with the word “fight” to signal that it’s okay to proceed- once he KNOWS the word I’ll get him another talking button to prompt me back, but for now, I’m going with body language- when he gives me his usual bastard signals, I say “fight”, sit on the ground, and cover my hands and arms with a backwards coat or a blanket. Right now, I put my covered arms up, and he’s been taking that as invitation to “attack”.

But I want him to know an emergency stop, too, so I figured when he bites too hard or gets too rough, I’ll make a high squeaking “ow” sound like I have normally since getting him.

Just like… five minutes ago, I was sitting on the floor wrassling with him, and one of his claws got through a hole and scratched my arm.

It wasn’t very bad, but it WAS a good learning opportunity, so I made the “ow” noise and dropped my arms.

My boy. My sweet perfect son. He froze mid-bite, holding on a second, then let go, let me scoot away, paused a sec… then snagged a nearby kicky fish toy, picked it up with his teeth, and started shaking it around like he was an angry little bulldog.

My precious baby angel recognized the ‘playing too rough/unhappy/pain’ sound, stopped of his own accord, and then- recognizing I was hurt and withdrawing, but still wanting very badly to fight- redirected himself UNPROMPTED to one of his toys instead of attempting to re-engage when I wasn’t ready

I’m so stupid proud right now. I’m very careful about not mentally anthropomorphizing animal behaviour because it can go so wrong but like. Seeing evidence that little mans KNEW we were playing, KNEW I wanted to stop, WANTED to keep going, made the connection in his head of “playing attack with dad - Dad hurt - Dad doesn’t want play - Ollie want play - attack Fishie” is absolutely insane.

It’s one thing to know he has a process, but it’s a totally different thing to like… slowly, carefully learn to work out exactly how he communicates, and watch him clearly think things out in return.

My baby likes to fight. My boy doesn’t want to hurt me. My little guy has a concept of respect and boundaries and inappropriate behaviour, as broad and nebulous as it is, and he is capable of making choices with that information.

It’s absolutely blowing my mind. He is a cat. He is 17 months old.

And he is demonstrating- to the greatest capacity that one could feasibly expect from an animal, to the best of his ability- what one may reasonably describe as kindness, consideration, and selflessness.

gonna need to tattoo vintage fashion, not vintage values on my forehead at this rate. "i dont care what other people think of how i dress" mfers when they realize their entire character can be misinterpreted (i'm mfers)