Love Petting Your Cat? There's A 'Red Zone' You Need To Avoid.

Is there anything better than a cat making biscuits on our bellies? Or kitties rubbing their fuzzy little chins against our shins? Or watching them zoom around the living room?

No. No there is not (and this is not up for debate).

Because these floofy goofballs bring us so much joy, we want to return the favor. But how do we know if we’re really making them happy? And when we’re loving on our cats, what should and shouldn’t we do?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Mikel Delgado, Ph.D., a cat behaviorist and scientist, when we recently chatted with her to learn the secrets of understanding our furry friends.

Listen to the full episode by pressing play:

It turns out we might be petting our cats all wrong.

“What I always like to start with when I’m talking about petting is an understanding of humans and what we like because this is where the conflict comes up,” Delgado said. “We are primates. We like to hug. We like to touch. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with this concept of the homunculus, but it’s a diagram of the physical human body in relationship to how the brain is organized and how much space is dedicated in our brain to different senses.”

The homunculus depicts a person with huge lips and gigantic hands, because these are two of the most sensitive parts of our bodies.

“Basically, what it means is we like to touch things — we like to touch them with our mouth, and we like to touch them with our lips,” she said. “We want to kiss our cats, we want to pet our cats, we want to hold them close. That’s the human experience — we want to touch a lot.”

Cats, on the other hand, are a “high-frequency, low-intensity species” when it comes to