Only one of a feline's fascinating - or, if you're a hater, "odd" - habits is kneading its paws against a soft object - very often the tender flesh of a nearby human being. This "kneading" is almost always accompanied by loud, rattly purring, and sometimes even by a little drool. That purring is involved would make the action seem to be borne out of contentment, but what of the sharp, sometimes aggressive, pricking? As Freud would have it, the genesis of this baffling behavior harkens back to the feline's kittenhood, from a time when kitty was nestled near its warm mother and - assuming its mother wasn't some abusive shrew - was blissfully content. Not surprisingly, the impetus for this particular happiness comes from feeding time; kittens knead their hungry little paws against their mother's belly in order to stimulate milk flow. The mother cat relies on the kneading - and the resulting piggy purring - to know when her kitten has had enough. When an adult cat salivates and/or kneads its paws against a human's softer parts, it is deeply content and is associating the contentment with the old kneading action.
unfortunately, this kind of love can cause a little unwitting damage ... say, in the middle of the night when an adult cat decides to wake up a sleeping human by expressing her love in the most basic way she knows how:
Out of the shower, I couldn't figure out at first why I had such odd red marks on my belly (please, please, not a reaction to the C.O. Bigelow's Lemon Body Lotion!!) until I got a load of Little Miss Innocent stretching her guilty white paws out on the bed.
Thank you, Heifer. I love you, too.
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