HOW PLAY DEVELOPS IN KITTENS

Play behaviour starts to develop when kittens are between two and three weeks old. Initially it is used as an important part of their social contact with their littermates and mother. I suspect that those of you lucky enough to have been a kitten parent will have enjoyed spending hours watching them ambush, chase, sneak, swat, and pounce on each other, while everything else that you should actually have been doing gets abandoned. But while this appears all very cute to us, it is an incredibly important experience for kittens as this is when they learn how to communicate and interpret the body language of their feline littermates. For example, they learn that if they bite too hard, there is likely to be harsh consequences dished out by the bitten sibling and this should eventually teach them not to repeat the behaviour, a practice that will stand them in good stead in the future.

All this learning means that when cats become adults, they should already understand what the rules of engagement are when they interact with each other.