Hello kitty or hello, scratchy? A lot of super excied young first-time pet owners will have dreams of cuddling a little kitten, playing with it and even watching as it sleeps without a care in the world? Here’s news for you: you’re gonna have some scarred hands and legs to go along with those super-cute memories. Most kittens, from the time of their birth as little tykes have extremely sharp claws and tend to exercise them with gay abandon. And that’s on the easiest surfaces that they find — you. “I remember when I first got Tyson, he was so little that I had these dreams of going to sleep with him on my bed, cuddled up next to me. But what happened was that he started to wake up at odd hours and scratch my back or any fleshy part really till he could clamber over me. It can really hurt,” said Tina Oomen, a cat owner. Once they’re old enough to venture out and walk, run, traipse and ramble across concrete and hard surfaces, their claws will even out. If that isn’t a news flash, we don’t know what is.
So, how do you make sure you make it through the clawy-clingy phase with out marks on your face? Protection. Apparently, these are a few really simple methods to ensure your safety, while playing with your kitten so that the scratches don’t quite get to you.
College professor and reluctant (at first) cat caretaker Esther Selvaraj admitted that she started putting towels on stray cloth on her sofas to keep them from being scratched and ripped first, but then began applying the same to her body. “It makes sense to hold kittens with a towel or wear full-sleeve clothing because you never know when they’ll try one of their mountaineering bids — you being the mountain, of course,” she says with a laugh
Other cat lovers like Shalini R and Hema let on that they’ve gone through a multitude of protective aids to keep the kittens from exerting their sharpness. “Oven mitts are something that we thought of but never got around to,” she admitted. “But what really worked for us was that we used my brother’s old hockey gloves, while handling the kittens and this sort of made it a fun game for them. The padded portions were thick enough to make them hang on and scratch it, to the extent where they would keep having a go at it even after we’d given up and taken it off our hands,” said Hema.
Prashant, who has had to contend with his girlfriend’s cat’s litter said that he hated them scratching his ankles when he was least expecting it, which is why he took to wearing socks while in the house too. Wait, socks everywhere? Even in the ‘rest’ room? “Well, that’s where their litter box was kept and for some reason they liked to get frisky and scratchy after they’d relieved themselves of their load, so yeah,” he said in a mock huff. Cover up in kitty territory!