<span>I believe B. Understatement</span>
The sentence had repetitive words replaced with synonyms and pronouns. "but my father disliked..." is too much alike to "my father disliked" so it would get tedious and harder to read.
They replaced it with "but he hated ... " to get some variation.
Answer:
The boy is playing a game.
By making a cat happy and feeding it ??
