Cat Aggression - Where, Why and When?

• Point your gun at it, hoping that by being aggressive towards it, it will apologize to you and back away shamefully
• Run like the wind
• Don't panic, stay quite calm, and still and wish the lion isn't hungry.

As you can see your choices are limited but I wouldn't want to show my aggression towards it, it will probably get more aggressive towards you, running like the wind may save you until the inevitable happens and it catches up with you, the best option is to stay calm. It's the same on a smaller scale with our cats, after all they are related to the big cats in the jungles and wilds of afar, the more you wind a cat up the more aggressive it gets, as it can't speak like humans and say "no", it speaks with it claws and teeth.

There are many reasons why cats are aggressive; lets call it 'feline aggression'. Understanding the reasons for the different types of 'feline aggression' and then trying to recognize the warning signs may help you to deal with these incidents of feline aggression. It's probably best to get a picture of 'feline aggression' in your head.

Imagine some scary movie - a snarling cat with sharp teeth showing through a wide-open mouth, its ears flattened back wards and its wide-open eyes showing a pair of dilated pupils. Accompany that with a melee of growls and hisses and it isn't very pleasant. Understanding the different types of 'feline aggression' and the reasons for them may help you deal with your cats aggression.

I'm not painting a nasty picture of Cats, but like us, they are prone to random bouts of aggression in various forms, it may seem an attack on yourself comes right out of the blue, but more often than not there are several warning signs, and identifying these warning signs could prevent some pretty painful bites and scratches.

If your cat has wide-open eyes then it is probably in an aggressive mood, if its pupils are dilated, it fears some kind of attack on him, however, its pupils do become very constricted when the cat tries to threaten back. Other signs are if the cat has flattened ears or its tail is lashing erratically, and to even complicate things - a straight tail with bristle fur is also a sign of aggression.

As you can see there are lots of things to be on the lookout for, it is not an easy thing to spot. If your cat is making hissing noises and sometimes spitting it is best not to agitate him as his meows could soon turn into growling and snarling. To understand feline aggression fully, I think you need to be educated in 'Cat Behaviorism', something that I am not. According to Behaviorists there are five main types of feline aggression.