Single kitten syndrome?

[theresa.rose]

Congratulations on welcoming Toby into your family!

The #1 thing to help keep kittens from scratching or biting is not using hands or feet as toys, ever, even it it looks absolutely adorable, because what's adorable now will be very painful a year from now. Interactive toys like wands with feather / mouse toys are wonderful, as they are highly engaging and keep the sharp bits away from you.

Beyond that, immediately end a play session when you get a scratch or bite (it's pretty much inevitable eventually, particularly as kittens go through teething and put absolutely everything into their mouth). Punishing a cat doesn't work, but taking away something they enjoy (your attention) is very effective as a negative reinforcer, which is different from a punishment.

Thank you! and yes, I was actually told the exact same thing from someone in real life, denying them the attention they want is often good discipline.

 

[pmv]

Thank you! and yes, I was actually told the exact same thing from someone in real life, denying them the attention they want is often good discipline.

Yup. The most important thing about any kind of reinforcement (positive or negative) is that it has to be immediate. When one of my kittens bites or scratches, I'll immediately make a higher-pitched "ouch" noise (even though their bites generally don't hurt at all) which acts as an "I'm stopping this session because you broke the rules" signal, and then I'll stop interacting with them. The important thing is the immediacy - if I didn't give a signal and I just walked away 20 seconds later, they'd never connect it with what they were doing 20 second prior, and wouldn't learn. That's why it's totally useless to punish an animal for something like if you find they previously peed on the floor; you can only reinforce a behavior in the moment the behavior is occurring.

Clicker training works on the same principle, but with positive reinforcement for desired behaviors. There, the click serves as a signal marking that they're about to get a reward for the action they did exactly when the click happened.