Hi! Thanks for running this blog. I’ve learned things reading it that I never knew I never knew. I have a question about domestic cat tail behavior. Google isn’t helping. I know that if a cat’s tail is straight up that means they’re happy. One of my two cats does that all the time. The other one holds the lower half of his tail straight up, but then it goes horizontal at the halfway point. I worry that maybe he’s not happy, or that he’s nervous. Or am I wrong?

why-animals-do-the-thing:

Those guides to cat tail behavior are really more of guidelines than rules. My mother has a cat for whom ‘happy’ tail is thrashing all over the place, constantly (until I learned to read her specific body language I thought the cat was always half a minute away from mauling me). Does your cat display normal behaviors of a happy cat when his tail is in that weird position? If, it’s probably just a quirk unique to him. 

Is there any way his tail was broken in the past? It may be that the tail just doesn’t go straight. We had a cat like that, who we adopted off the street, and the last few inches of his tail couldn’t straighten up. It didn’t seem to hurt him, and the vet said it had healed years ago.