“Bad” Behavior Never Comes Out of Nowhere
The mistake I made, and what I learned...
If you’re new here: Fifi is the feral cat who adopted us. He showed up in our neighborhood a year and a half ago, probably eight or nine years old, likely with little to no gentle human contact in his life before us. It took six months before he’d let me get close enough to touch him. Now he eats here twice a day, comes inside, snuggles with my five cats, sleeps on my lap, and lets me clean out wounds from the fights he still gets into with other ferals outside. He’s family. He also still has limits, and they move depending on the day.
We were on the grass that morning. Coffee, sun, my cats sprawled around us sunbathing, chewing grass, minding their own business. I called Fifi over, which he does now, easy, unbothered, like it’s just part of his day.
He doesn’t usually go to Lucas (my partner). That morning he did.
I have it on video, and watching it back, you can see the whole thing happen in real time. Lucas reached out and scratched the top of Fifi’s head. Fifi gave a swipe, quick, controlled, claws barely out. A warning, not an attack. Lucas didn’t catch it. He went back in for another scratch. Fifi’s ears pinned back and he swiped again, a little harder this time. Still not trying to hurt him. Just: back off, buddy.
I don’t say any of this to make Lucas sound careless, because he isn’t. He’s been with me 10+ years. He isn’t a cat person. Wasn’t, before me. Ten years in, he’s better. Genuinely better. He’s absorbed a lot just from being next to someone who’s spent her whole life translating what cats won’t say out loud. But absorbing isn’t the same as reading. He can tell you when a cat is obviously happy. What he still misses is the part before the obvious part. He still misses the ten seconds before a swipe, the ear shift, the stillness, the moment an invitation closes or boundaries are set.
After the second swipe, Fifi walked away from Lucas and came straight to me. And this is the part I don’t love admitting, and it would have been easier to leave it out (but also inauthentic). I reached for him right away, the same way Lucas did. I told myself the trust between us meant this exact moment was safe, that I could skip the read and go straight to contact. He does trust me, more than probably any human. But trusting me in general and being ready for a hand on him in that specific second are two different things, and I skipped the question that would have told me which one I was dealing with.
He settled with me faster than he did with Lucas. Within seconds he rubbed against my legs, let me scratch his back, flopped down in the grass in front of me, and gave a little meow. On the surface, it would’ve been easy to tell myself, “See? He trusts me.”
But that’s not actually what happened.
What happened is that his nervous system recovered. He regulated. And because I’ve spent the last year and a half paying attention to the tiny signals most people never realize are there, I recognized the moment his body said, “Okay...I’m ready again.”
That’s the part I almost skipped.
The mistake I made wasn’t reaching for him. It was assuming that because he trusts me most days, I didn’t need to ask how he felt in this moment. I almost treated our history together like permission, instead of checking in with the cat standing in front of me.
That’s the same skill Lucas is still learning. Not because he’s careless. Simply because nobody teaches us that cats are communicating long before they ever hiss, growl, or swipe.
Most people think a swipe comes out of nowhere.
It almost never does.
Cats aren’t acting out of spite. They’re communicating the only way they know how after softer signals have gone unnoticed.
Reading a cat isn’t something you automatically know how to do. You learn by paying attention. By watching. By getting it wrong sometimes. By realizing that what looked like “out of nowhere“ actually started ten seconds earlier.
Watching the video back reminded me of something I already knew, but apparently needed to learn again.
Trust doesn’t mean a cat stops communicating.
It means they trust you to keep paying attention.
Even after months or years together, every interaction is still a new conversation. And if we’re not listening, they’ll eventually find a louder way to make sure we do.
Have you ever looked back at one of your cat’s “bad” moments and realized the signs were there all along?
You may also like…
Subscribe to Holistic AF 4 Cats
By Ashley Hejlik · Holistic Feline Specialist
Real talk about cat health, low-tox living, behavior, and the things most people don’t question… but should. Written from experience, not theory.