Your Maine Coon Guide

Do Maine Coons have a temper?

- October 06, 2023

Do Maine Coons have a temper? This is a question asked on one of the top Maine Coon websites which Google favours. And I've got to say that it is a slightly stupid or misleading question. That might sound arrogant of me but I will explain myself.

No domestic cat has a bad temper unless they are ill. Although they might be suffering from audiogenic reflex seizures or other environmental problems. I'll look at illness first.

Pain

When a cat feels pain inside their body, they may be quiet about it. They might go quiet. They might sleep more than normal and find a quiet corner in the home. But you don't really know what's going on at least initially.

So, you pick up your Maine Coon to give him a cuddle. They are very cuddly. Your Maine Coon companion cries out and strikes out at you as if in retaliation. You don't understand. You might think that your cat has suddenly developed a bad temper but he hasn't.

He/she has simply responded to feeling pain when you picked them up and therefore, wrongly, equated you with the cause of the pain. You can't blame them because they are instinctive. They've put two and two together and come up with five.

Audiogenic reflex

Feline audiogenic reflex seizures (FARS) are caused by sharp crinkly noises normally in older cats. Not all cats respond like this. They may not have a seizure but they may become very irritated and irritable. It may cause abnormal behaviour and you might not know why. The answer here is to avoid sharp crinkly noises such as may be tinfoil in the kitchen.

You might have seen a video on social media of a Maine Coon cat jumping up onto a counter that is covered in tinfoil. The cat leaps towards the ceiling as soon as they make contact with the tinfoil. Domestic cats are terrified of the stuff.

Redirected aggression

Another possibility for a Maine Coon cat who appears to have developed a bad temper is redirected aggression. Let's say your Maine Coon cat is a full-time indoor cat which is most likely. Let's say there's a strange cat outside who continually comes into the back yard which is part of the Maine Coon cat's home range as far as they are concerned. That applies even if they are full-time indoor cats.

Your Maine Coon can't do a thing about that strange cat trespassing on his home range. Normally, if he was allowed outside, he would attack the cat. He becomes frustrated. He wants to attack but he can't. So, he attacks you instead in redirecting his aggression against a creature that he can approach. Notwithstanding that it happens to be the person who feeds him. This might happen from time to time although it is probably unlikely.

But it would be an example of redirected aggression. There are other causes of redirected aggression such as when a cat goes outside and confronts a fox and the fox scares the cat so he races indoors and then bites his owner. On both occasions these cats have not suddenly turned nasty with bad tempers. They are the same cat as before.

Mental illness

Perhaps, exceedingly rarely, a domestic cat might be mentally disturbed perhaps because of terrible early experiences in their lives. Or they might even have a mental illness which was inherited. Although nobody, and I stress nobody including the best veterinarians and expert do not know anything about feline mental illness. And that's true even if they say they know about it.

But if an expert like, for example, Jackson Galaxy, is unable to pinpoint the cause of a cat's aggression they might, after careful consideration, decide that the cat has a mental health problem. They might prescribe tranquillisers, antidepressants and so on. These can prove effective by the way.

I recently wrote about a Maine Coon cat that was indeed prescribed antidepressant because he was aggressive when in the vicinity of certain sounds. He was actually aggressive towards his human caregiver. I suggested it might have been audiogenic reflex issues. You can read about that cat if you wish by clicking on the link below. It does establish to a certain extent that Maine Coon cats can apparently develop bad tempers when there is no apparent reason for it.

Always a reason

I should say that there is always a reason for cat behaviour including Maine Coon cat behaviour. It will nearly always be environmental. That means it is something the owner is doing or doing to the environment in which they live. It might, for example, be another cat suddenly introduced into their lives. Often in homes where there is more than one cat there is agonistic behaviour between the cats because they want to defend their greatly shrunk home territory which often overlaps causing irritation and stress.

Rarely aggression will be inherited and sometimes, just sometimes exceedingly rarely it is be because the cat has a bad temper.

Human terminology

Last point: let's remind ourselves that the phrase "bad temper" describes human behaviour. We should be extremely cautious about describing our cats with terminology that is designed to describe humans. Often it doesn't work well and we tend to colour our cat's behaviour with human behaviour and the two are entirely different.