Male cat has 'sex' with bed clothes

This is actually pretty normal and certainly not very unusual although the owner was nonplussed. My cat does something similar on my arm when I am wearing an old fleece dressing gown. I let him do it and this owner should let his cat do it. Why? Because it pleases him, and it does no harm and it's not really an inconvenience for the human caregiver in my view. Human caregivers should do all they can to please their cat. This often means allowing them to express natural behaviour.

Male cat has 'sex' with bed clothes. Screenshot.

It is entirely instinctive. You can see that he wants to hump his owner because he has grabbed the fictional female by the scruff of our neck in his jaws. He is clearly confused because he thinks that the bedsheet is a female cat.

It sort of proves that cats are very instinctive in their behaviour, and they don't rationalise what they're doing. If they did this cat would understand that he has a bedsheet in his mouth that he is trying to hump.

To me, it doesn't signify any mental health problem. It's just, as I said, instinctive and an outlet for his natural drives and motivators. Dogs like to hump their owner's leg sometimes for the same sort of reason. Our pets need an outlet for their sexual urges and there's not much of an outlet for them.

And notably, domestic cats can still have an urge to procreate even when they are neutered i.e., their balls have been removed. I think that it is a very cruel operation but a very necessary one at the same time. Losing the production of testosterone does not sometimes prevent their urge to procreate.

On that basis, it seems that the origin of the urge to procreate does not come from testosterone but survival of the species, I guess. Testosterone probably heightens the urge and drives male cats harder to pass on their genes.

 

Note: sometimes embedded videos stop working or malfunction, something I cannot, regrettably control.