Hand Raised Kitten with Biting Issue... any advice? Here is the sitch...

so we have a kitten who was rescued and had raised by a foster parent for one month before coming to a facility where a friend adopted him.

he is all sorts of cute, and when calm enough, enjoys the people and company. Otherwise, all he wants to do is get away from you, or he wants to play and is playing too rough- i.e. biting the hand that feeds it.

is this normal kitten behavior - the biting- and is there any way to slowly ween him off? also he is just hitting 3 months old and still has his baby teeth. is this only a phase where teething i an issue?

any feed back would be great :]

A lot of hand raised kittens have oral fixation problems. Their moms would have naturally stopped that behavior and us humans don't really know how to train a kitten. I've got 3 bottle fed cats in my house. I haven't had biters, but I've had sucklers.

My friend adopted a kitten that was separated from his mom too young and had a horrible biting issue. After a lot of trial and error, she found a couple of things that worked. When he bit her, she would hiss at him (as his mom would), then simply hold the bitten part (finger, hand, etc) still so that it was no longer fun to do. If you pull away, the bite only becomes harder. Once he calmed down and pulled away, he got a toy to play with. She never used her hands to play with him, as those were the obvious choice of attack. Wand toys are a great help, as it puts distance between you and the biting kitten without taking away his fun.

Hope this helps.

Momofmany has some good advice. Hissing worked for me with Bijou, he was a little dickens - now he never ever bites.

Another thing I was going to suggest is get some of the fat plastic straws and throw some around. They help with teething, make a great toy and are hard to tear apart so are pretty safe. When I found one that was quite chewed up I simply put it in the garbage and put out some new ones.