I need some advice from wiser cat owners than myself.
About a year and a half ago I adopted a three year old longhaired lovely cat. He has generally settled in well to our home. He likes to roam about outside in the garden mostly at night and generally sleeps inside in the days. When he is settled on a bed he loves a stroke and he purrs and seems very relaxed. He is not one for sitting on knees really, but he does do occasionally (my knee only). We seem to have bonded well on the face of it. He loves his food. He likes being in the same room as us inside.
My problem though is when we are both in the garden at the same time. There have been quite a few occasions where I've gone outside and, if he is out there, he just launches himself at my legs with claws out and tries to bite me. He gets this wild look in his eyes and just seems like a wild animal. The first time happened when it was dark and I wondered if it was because I was in "his" territory and it was unusual for him (we had gone outside to look for a meteor shower that night). I put it down to it being a change in his routine. But its carried on at other times too.
He has long sharp claws and is a big cat, and its painful when he does it. This morning I'd gone to stand out in the garden with a cup of coffee first thing in the morning and he did it again and actually drew blood on my legs. Perhaps it was because he wanted to be fed first...and was cross I was drinking coffee and not feeding him perhaps?
I don't know how to respond to it. On instinct I usually push him off, shriek and run off, or grab the nearest thing like a garden chair to hold in front of me to keep him away from my legs while I back into the house. He did it again this afternoon and I pushed him away and shouted "NO!" and ran inside.
I have a 6 year old daughter and he has on occasion tried to do similar to her, but I have intervened before he reached her, but I feel like I have to be on red alert when she is in the garden with him, and with the weather being nicer now I just want to be able to go in and out of the house when I want without worrying about being attacked by the cat.
I wondered if its just like...young cat behaviour? Like rough and tumble type stuff? But he's nearly 4 now so I would have thought that would have calmed down by now?
I wondered if it was associated with him being hungry (he has a big appetite and always seems hungry, and like I said above it happened this morning before I had fed him), but I worry about overfeeding him in an attempt to keep him happy at all times, and that seems the wrong way to approach it.
I am getting to the stage where I'm scared of my own cat now. I feel really sad about it because he seems so loving and docile at other times, and we generally have a good bond. But it just seems like specifically the garden is a problem area for him. Any advice?