Cat Attacks At Random Times

Alright, I have a 9 month old cat. This is the first cat I've ever owned. He's an adorable cat and I really love him, but...he viciously attacks me relatively often. I live in an apartment with 3 other guys and I try to leave my cat in my room whenever I'm not here so he doesn't bother them or anything. However, I figured that being cooped up a lot of the time might be why he's attacking me, so for the past 2 weeks I've been letting him rome around the kitchen and living room and my room and he's been a lot better, a lot less attacking me. However, it's not completely gone. A lot of the time, when I'm sitting at my desk on the computer, Mowgli will sneak up behind my chair and leap onto my back, or shoulders or head and sink his claws into my skin and bite me. Whenever he does this, I quickly grab him and take him off, yell "no" at him, and put him in the bathroom for a while to calm down. Sometimes, if I'm not quick enough to grab him, he'll leap onto me, and then jump right back off and run away like he knows he did something wrong. This is the only way he attacks me since I've let him rome around the entire apartment, which is a lot better than when he used to do that plus other random attacks. Anyways, I'm now constantly looking over my shoulder, scared that he'll attack me when I'm on my computer, it sucks. What do you guys think? what could be causing this? should i react in a different way when he does this to me? please please help me and let me know if you need any other information.

I'm not a cat expert by any means but could it be that this is his idea of playing? I know my ex-feral will sometimes play something I call 'bite my foot' where I'll be walking around the house and out of nowhere he'll try to tackle me. It's kind of cute (although sometimes it hurts ) but it is definitely playtime as far as he is concerned.

ya, i guess it might just be him playing, but it's not okay you know? any ideas on how I can let him know that we can play, but not like that?

I wish I could help! My cat just seemed to 'know' to pull his claws in when he was playing-not idea how! OK maybe I screamed a couple of times when he scratched or bit too hard, but I am not very good at training cats, sorry!

We keep a squirt bottle nearby, so if a kitty gets out of hand or is doing something he/she shouldn't, they get a squirt. Obviously, they HATE that and know that when we aim the bottle, they stop. Also, canned air works really well too. We don't spray anything in the face ever but let me tell ya, you can easily train them what NOT to do

Good luck!

Have you read this sticky at the top of the Behavior forum? Some parts of it seem relevant to your situation.

sounds a bit similar to what dave was like every so often when he was around that age.
He would start off quite playfully but would not realise at first how rough he got. We would always make sure if he went too far that he was given some quiet time.
After a while he stopped the roughness but still played with us which we loved too.