One moment your cat is purring under your hand; the next, its teeth are on your wrist. Every cat owner knows this scene, and most have asked the same question afterwards: did I do something wrong, or does my cat simply not like me? The honest answer is usually neither. Behaviorists who study cats agree that in most cases a bite is not aggression at all — it is communication.
A cat that bites is almost always telling you something specific, and the message can range from affection to a genuine warning about its health. Below are the five things a bite can mean, the signals that come before it, and what to do when one actually lands.
Cats signal more than they speak
Adult cats rarely meow at one another — that vocabulary is reserved almost entirely for humans. Among themselves, cats communicate through the body: the position of the ears, the movement of the tail, the tension in the skin. Physical contact is part of that language too, and the mouth plays a role in it.
So when your cat uses its teeth on you, it is borrowing from cat-to-cat vocabulary, and the meaning depends entirely on context. Behaviorists distinguish five different messages a bite can carry. The first one fools almost everyone, because it is the opposite of what it seems.