I’m asking for advice on cat dynamics. I’m gong to explain the cats and the situation involved in detail, and the specific question is below the cut.<\/p>\n
Here’s the situation. Mike and I have two cats. One is a female, Athena, who is about four years old. We got her from the animal shelter last year. She seems to have been traumatized at some point in her past, probably via whatever landed her in the shelter as a three-year-old spayed cat who had obviously been someone’s pet. The shelter found her abandoned. She’s a dilute tortoiseshell, affectionate, sedentary, not super-bright, and kind of obnoxious–she pees when she’s stressed, or whenever she finds something she’d like to pee on, meaning our house has had to become an afghan\/blanket\/loose fabric free zone. If she’s really stressed, she’ll pee on our quilts or our clothes. We have to keep our bedroom door closed most of the time.<\/p>\n
We also have a little, male grey tabby, Hermes, who is about a year old. He’s a cat we adopted from a stray litter someone took in. He has no trauma issues, is extremely affectionate and playful, and is one of the best cats I’ve ever had.<\/p>\n
Hermes and Athena had their rough patches for the first few months when Hermes was a kitten who wanted Athena to play with him. Athena was like, “Um, no, and also get away.” They’ve worked it out, though, and are now good friends. Athena grooms Hermes, and they rub against each other whenever their paths intersect, and they sometimes sleep in a pile. Athena still hisses\/growls\/bats occasionally, but I don’t think this is so much a hostile maneuver as a “not now, kid, come on.”<\/p>\n
Enter cat three. <\/p>\n
Nine years ago, when I withdrew from Sarah Lawrence after my freshman year, I asked my parents to get another cat, and eventually they did. His name is Alexi and he’s part Maine Coon. He’s a gorgeous animal. He was six months old when we picked him up from the shelter, but already the same size as an average cat. As a grown cat, he’s enormous. He actually weighs about the same as Athena, but where she’s fat, he’s just very big. His huge, thick coat makes him look even bigger. He has the classic mane and tufted ears; he’s just very beautiful.<\/p>\n
He’s also inquisitive, intelligent, and gentle, with the characteristic tiny mrrp voice of Maine Coons. He’s pretty independent and usually chooses to spend most of the day going about his own business, but he requires at least two intense bouts of petting a day. He’s a really nice cat, and I’ve always liked him a lot.<\/p>\n
There were several years–when I was at Santa Cruz and Iowa–when I couldn’t have a cat with me, so Alexi stayed with my parents. My parents also had a second cat, a small and grouchy tuxedo cat–Natasha–who wanted nothing more than for people to sit and pet her all day. Even though they lived together for seven years, Alexi and Natasha never got along. This was primarily Natasha’s fault–she DESPISED Alexi from the moment she first saw him when he was a kitten. Every time she ever, ever saw him, she seemed to remember all of a sudden, “Oh my God, THERE’S ANOTHER CAT. I WILL NEVER HAVE PEACE AGAIN.” She hissed, growled, scratched, batted, and freaked the fuck out. She rarely did it with her claws out, although exceptions could be made.<\/p>\n
Alexi, for his part, mostly just hung out. He rarely aggressed. He never made noise. He’d just kind of see her freaking out and then sit down, seemingly sadly.<\/p>\n
Or, if you interpret it another way, he’d see her freaking out, and then sit at the very periphery of her freak-out range, as if asserting his right to be there.<\/p>\n
She was dominant. She got to eat first and stuff. But periodically, Alexi would get sick of being yelled at all the time for the crime of existing and… retalliate. He’d wait around a corner, patiently for a long time, and then pounce when she walked by. (She took to looking nervously around corners, even when he was nowhere near.) He’d sit on the other side of the cat door, knowing she wouldn’t go through if she saw him. And every once in a while, he’d just chase her around–being so much bigger and faster than she was that he’d be running literally on top of her.<\/p>\n
It sucked that they hated each other, but nothing we or my parents tried solved it.<\/p>\n
Imagine everyone’s surprise when–after Natasha’s death–Alexi went into mourning. His behavior patterns changed. He lost weight. He started crying all the time. My parents go on long trips a couple times a year, and he completely freaked out while they were gone–he couldn’t handle being alone in the house for weeks at a time. Also, he was peeing and pooping in inappropriate places to demonstrate this, which was freaking my mom out.<\/p>\n
So the next time my parents planned a trip, I couldn’t handle the idea of him being so miserable again, so when my mom started complaining over the phone about the inevitable gastric evidence of his displeasure, I said, “Okay, you know what? Let’s just move Alexi to our house.”<\/p>\n
This was a solution which had been proposed before. When Mike and I moved to Bakersfield, we’d intended to take Alexi with us–but we initially moved into an apartment, and we knew he wouldn’t tolerate the lack of backyard. By the time we were in circumstances to take him, it just didn’t seem like a good idea–we knew Alexi would hate being relocated to a new range, and also my parents really love him when he’s not crapping underneath the piano. So everyone decided he’d stay with them, and we’d get our own cats, which of course we did.<\/p>\n
Last time I posted about Alexi, people seemed unsure about whether or not he’d remember us from my parents’ house. He does, of course. Mike and I have both lived with him for large sections of his life. We know him well.<\/p>\n
He’s adjusting pretty well to our house, in some ways. He spent a few days wandering about moaning and looking for my parents, but then he stopped. He no longer bangs on every closed door to see if it will open on his old house. We leave the back door open, and he traverses our yard, and goes out to play wherever the cats do, and then comes home and sleeps by our feet, or in our closet. He’s stopped the mourning behaviors–he doesn’t cry all the time anymore. He seems a lot less lonely.<\/p>\n
But our cats HATE him.<\/p>\n
On the surface, he seems to react to their hatred the same way he reacted to Natasha’s. He walks around, going about his business, and when another cat freaks out, he just kind of flops on the floor and sits there until they quiet down. Occasionally, he pads after the other cats, mrrping a hello noise, seeming for all the world like he’s saying, “Please? Be my friend?” And sometimes he and Hermes have a little, obnoxious standoff situation where they sit on opposite sides of the cat door and glower (I think Hermes is initiating these).<\/p>\n
When Athena sees him, she growls and growls, like Natasha used to. Hermes is either indifferent, friendly (I’ve seen them rub on each other and sniff without clashing) or sometimes freaks the fuck out. He rolls around, growling and making a gargling sound, his ears go back, he bares his teeth, and unsheaths his claws. Twice, when the altercation happened on our bed, Alexi chased Hermes out of the room (with no violence afterward; we followed). But the rest of the time, when Hermes freaks out, Alexi just sits down in response. Alexi’s usual behavior SEEMS very pacifist.<\/p>\n
Except, I don’t think it is.<\/p>\n
Hermes is a rough-and-tumble cat. He wrestles with the strays outside; there’s a very young black cat in particular who always comes up to play with him. Hermes ends up with wounds, but I think it’s just from rough play. So I can’t tell whether Hermes is getting beat up these days, or whether he’s just doing the kitten equivalent of skinning his knee.<\/p>\n
But someone’s pummeling Athena.<\/p>\n
Last week, we noticed a puncture wound over her eye. This week, there are two more. She’s never been wounded before. Now suddenly Alexi moves in and she is.<\/p>\n
Alexi never, ever hurt Natasha. But this is a new house and a new situation. Is he hurting Athena?<\/p>\n
He’s not doing it when we’re around, and I’m actually around most of the time. But sometimes, we sleep. Is he doing it then?<\/p>\n
We’ve taken some steps to try to calm all the cats. We have one of those plug-in, smell-generating things thats supposed to soothe cats. We have a bottle of spray that’s supposed to simulate cat-face pheromones and calm the cats down by making them think all the territory is already marked as theirs. We’ve stopped closing the back door at night (which we did because we would prefer the cats not be able to get into the street after dark) which has allowed Alexi and Hermes to go out to run around and blow off steam at night, instead of all piling on our bed to sleep with us and having enormous cat fights at 3 AM, which was not something we could live with long-term. (They seem to have settled for sleeping with us in shifts.)<\/p>\n
But I’m not sure what else to do. Obviously, I don’t want Athena to get beat up on a regular, long term basis. If this is some kind of hierarchical cat issue that will work itself out once the new dominance is established in a month or two… well, I’m not in love with the idea, but I guess everyone can live with it for a short period of time. But if we’re subjecting her to long-term bullying and injury? No, absolutely not.<\/p>\n
In that case, we’ll have to send Alexi back to my parents’ house–where he will be alone and where he will start crying all the time again. Obviously, Alexi doesn’t want to be left alone without humans. But equally obviously, he wants to be around other cats. But that’s not going to work if he injures them.<\/p>\n
We’ve got the interests of all three cats to balance here, as well as our own need for some sort of household harmony, and–you know–occasional sleep.<\/p>\n
Maybe there’s some magic bullet behavioral therapy, or technological assistance, that we can employ here. It would be a big relief if there were. I know many people manage much larger herds of cats than our discordant three. Is there a trick to it? What’s your advice?<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Hmm! A new wrinkle! My friend Ann asks, “Are there any new cats who’ve showed up in the territory besides Alexi?” Why, yes, there is a new orange tabby. Perhaps he is the culprit who’s wounding Athena. Particularly since A) Alexi has no track record of hurting Natasha (though plenty of track record of coming home with wounds from fights with strays outside, which Natasha never did), and B) Athena’s first wound showed up last week, which coincides with new orange tabby’s appearance, but Alexi’s been here for about three.<\/p>\n
I think we may try keeping all the cats indoors for a bit. This is antithetical to both peace of mind (the cats go a bit nuts when they can’t run around like they’re used to being able to) and sleeping (because of the kerfuffles on the bed), but maybe we can lock Alexi in the garage at night for the duration of the experiment. He’s used to it; my parents have always done that with their cats.<\/p>\n
Lack of wounds on Athena during the experiment wouldn’t be *conclusive*, but it might be suggestive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m asking for advice on cat dynamics. I’m gong to explain the cats and the situation involved in detail, and the specific question is below the cut. Here’s the situation. Mike and I have two cats. One is a female, … Continue reading