Our cats have all kinds of ritualized interactions, which often involve full minutes of gradual paw raising, sometimes ending with that (and a back-down) and other times proceeding into a mutual head-whap fest (the last recourse of fierce but clawless cats). It looks like dominance behavior, although there's little question anymore about who rules the roost, so there must be more to it. I wish I could get video to show how slowly the early steps go by . . .
Here Pixel approaches with *slowly* raising paw.
Yogi waits to see whether that's the end of it.
As you can see, Pixel proceeded to put a foot on the tree, and Yogi responds with some whapping from her superior position.
Now we're past kabuki into mutual whapping. Yogi is a premium hisser, but she's liable to back down when it's no longer worth the hassle . . .
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