Kittenzen: Root causes

Our girl kittens Mallory and Jane are a little over 7 months now and are at times displaying some mildly aggravating behavior that we might attribute to being in heat. I am really not sure at all if they are in heat or just being kittens but I just made the appointment to have them spayed next week.

So yesterday Mallory, our tortoiseshell, was in our basket of bird books and clawing at the books and biting them which, once again, I attributed to annoying behavior caused by overactive hormones. I usually try to distract them from what I don't want them to do by moving them somewhere else or giving them something appropriate to bite on like a cat treat. But this time if I moved Mallory she beelined back to the basket and was not at all interested in any treats. My tactics had failed and I was at a loss. But Mark suggested there might be something in the basket she was after. Eureka! We pulled out all of the books and there at the bottom of the basket was the little gray mouse toy that is a perennial favorite of our cats. Mallory pounced on it, got it between her teeth and proudly pranced away. I had tears in my eyes because Mark recognized that her intention was not to annoy us or to destroy our books but to get something she had lost and that brought her great satisfaction. I had misread why she was doing what she was doing.

My sister Louisa who is an animal behavior specialist (particularly behavior of cats and dogs) taught me that animals generally have pretty good reasons for the "bad" behaviors they exhibit and it is our job as their "guardians" to understand why they do what they do. Only then can we address the behaviors. Just punishing them may work on the short term but doesn't address the root cause of the behavior and a repressed desire will resurface, as Freud would say, with a vengeance. You can't ask an animal why it is doing something and so you really need to believe that it has a reason--that puts you in an entirely different framework than you have if you simply think its purpose is to aggravate you by doing something you don't like. Believing that there is a logic to what the animal is doing turns the situation into a game of figuring out why the behavior is occurring and then your analytical skills are freed up to help you uncover the root cause.

I think we do this kind of misreading constantly with people around us. They may occasionally be doing something just to annoy us, perhaps, but generally annoying or even hurtful behavior is done for reasons other than we first think. It may be as simple as an attempt to get something that they need. And asking a person or child why they are doing what they are doing is always a good first step, but sometimes they don't know. Instead of giving up on them and just being angry or annoyed, think of it as a game of parsing out the underlying reason for or cause of their behavior: what is their mouse beneath the books?