#cat conditioning

So the answer is and isn’t pretty straight forward. Kittens go through a VERY important stage as kittens, typically around 2-7 weeks of age. If they’re handled by humans during this stage, they wind up having better relationships with humans as adults, tolerate being held much more, and in general have much healthier human-cat bonds. Now, since during this period of time it’s also very important for cats to still have contact with the queen and their litter mates, it’s not ideal for someone to just adopt a cat at this time, known as their Socialization Period. 

There are even degrees to how long they should be handled and by how many people! As little as 15 minutes of human handling per day is enough to make a pretty large impact on the cat’s future and their relationship with humans. Up to an hour per day is ideal, though. Handling them, holding them, touching their feet and ears, even looking at their teeth. This will get them used to handling that they’ll need to experience as an adult. 

If a kitten is held only by a single person, though, the cat will most likely only bond to that single person. So if you plan on keeping this kitten, being the only one to hold it probably won’t have an overall negative effect. They’ll be closer with the handler, tolerate much more from that person, and generally will have a very strong bond with that individual. Now if you want the cat to be friendly and accept ALL human interaction, not just the interaction with an individual, multiple people should handle the kitten on a daily basis.

Kittens who miss this socialization window are very unlikely to ever gain the ability to tolerate being handled. There are things you can do to make them more comfortable and pliant with handling, but in general, the behavior is pretty difficult to alter. That being said, they can still grow to enjoy the company of humans, certainly! But they still have a generalized fear of being handled.

After this period, you can still try to get the cat to tolerate things, like clipping their nails, by touching their feet often, or get the accustomed to brushing by starting with softer brushes and going through with the action in a positive way from a young age. These things can be conditioned into a cat’s routine even as they grow older. They can grow to tolerate it, even if it’s not done at the socialization stage. As always, it’s best if it’s done as young as possible, but even older cats can grow accustomed to these behaviors, depending on their personality.

Now here’s the not so straight forward part of the answer. Personality. Cat behaviorists have theories about feline personalities. There are generally accepted theories, but even then, they can be hard to pinpoint. Cats can’t tell us what they like or how they think, so it’s difficult to really target where their personalities come from, how they develop, or how they affect the cat.

I’m still in the process of gathering as much information as I can about developing cat personalities, but as far as I’m aware, there’s a theory that cats can actually pick up the personality of their father. Even if the queen is a less-than-friendly individual, if the father was a friendly cat, the kitten is more likely to become a friendly adult. Even if the kitten never interacts with their father (which is incredibly common), they still can inherit personality traits from him.

So, basically, human intervention with kittens is the ideal factor in making a pliant, tolerant adult cat. Personality definitely plays a role in their ability to adapt to stimuli once they’re older and pass that socialization period, though. Ideally, you get a combination of both a well socialized cat and one with an adaptive and tolerant personality.

Take my semi-feral 10 month old kittens, for example. Citra and Simcoe were picked up off the street at 10 weeks old, and had no interaction with humans, as far as anyone was aware. This was well after their socialization period, although some socialization can be done up to 12 weeks, but they were caged and not given human interaction in their foster home. Their first interaction with humans began when they were put in a store front, and seeing people constantly who tried to pet them through the bars of their cage. Realistically, I knew that these cats would probably never tolerate human affection because they were so old by the time we adopted them. However, despite zero socialization, their personalities have made it so that they not only tolerate some human interaction, but actively seek it out. Citra will approach strangers for petting and affection. Simcoe sleeps with us every single night and meows for attention from me after she wakes up. They are incredibly social compared to what most feral cats grow up into. This willingness to socialize comes completely from their personality. They are, however, still completely unwilling to be handled, and while we work on improving that, they’ll probably never be okay with being handled. But seeking affection is a HUGE step for feral cats.