OOOOH! Yes. That's another good point that I never even thought about. I just naturally never used my hands, because I don't like it anyways, but I always used a feather on a stick/string.

Another thing I never use is laserpens. I used to. I feel bad that I ever did. It's fun, but then you learn that cats play is only stimulating their hunting drives. And since they can catch the feather on a string, they feel a sense of satisfaction for having caught it. Whereas they can't catch a red dot. So never catching it apparently gives them PTSD. They feel depressed that they can't be good hunters if they can't catch the red dot.

Play fighting is fine, they just need to learn claw control. Recoil and stop play when you get clawed. I've got three cats here I can wrestle with without getting a mark on my hands or arms. A long thick jumper they know is safe, but bare skin they know is not for claws. It's so well learned that even when you need to do some maintenance or intervention they don't like, they will not claw you. Like washing diarrhea out of their fur, or some emergency medical intervention.

I tried to tell my wife this, multiple times. Now she wonders why the cat plays gentle with me but rough as hell with her.

She (the cat) will still attack my hand, but without claws or biting hard. She'll even get under the blankets to fight me through them.

The way I accomplished this was by teaching her that if she got too rough it meant no more playing for about an hour. Since she always wants to play, it was an effective deterrent.

So, are hand puppets a middle ground?

Yeah I lived with someone who ruined the cat by rough housing with bare skin… I have extremely fragile skin and will bleed from touching the edge of cardboard, so you can imagine what cat claws do to me. Even the cat gently dragging it's nail across my skin will cut me open like a sausage. It took so, so long to unlearn those habits from the cat…