Advice on Getting a Second Cat

In My Humble Opinion
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Okay, we tried again today. Fed the cat, fed the kittens, locked kittens in the bathroom, coaxed the cat to check out the kitten room. Let her get comfortable, petted her a bit. Let a kitten (same one, as it happened) check her out.

This time the kitten acknowledged the cat, while she ignored him. She looked at him after he got fairly close. She didn’t hiss immediately, but did soon. He walked over to my husband, who petted him. I petted the cat a bit. Then the kitten walked generally towards the cat, and she hissed, and when i tried to pet her she hissed again.

I was going to scoop up the kitten to put him in the bathroom, when the cat stalked to the door out to the hall, so i opened that and let her out, and closed the door behind her.

Husband followed, and i let the kittens back into their bedroom, where two are curled up on my lap and the other two are wrestling.

Then i let the rest of the

62

Then you let the rest of the . . .

pack of polar bears out, and they ate you?

Resident Cat does not currently think that she wants to live with kittens; but instead of trying to drive them out or murder them she’s willing to cede them the kitten-room-and-bath.

This is slow progress, but it’s not a disaster. Again, sometimes these things take weeks or months but still wind up with close friendships. If she’s willing to come into the kitten room tomorrow (cat treats?), you could try with a different kitten each day. If tomorrow she seems dead set against it, I wouldn’t force her – but I’d start occasionally letting a kitten, supervised, into a common room – not your bedroom, if Resident Cat sleeps there; or if she doesn’t, then ideally not whichever room she usually sleeps in.

And lots of patting, and cat treats if applicable, for Resident Cat in general. Which you’re probably already doing.

ETA: it occurs to me that one of the kittens probably figured out how to hit Post Reply when you weren’t looking. Proper cat education going on there!

63

Kittens into their bedroom.

I mean, don’t all cats want to kill invading new cats? That seems like the norm.

We actually haven’t offered cat treats in years. We had cats who had no interest in them, and gave up. But these are different cats. And the resident cat is very food oriented.

64

Nope; most just want to chase them off.

And I’ve seen that stage last as little as a few hours – or as much as a few weeks.

The only time I had to re-home a cat over it, it was the New Cat who was the problem. He was a very large yellow Very Tom Cat who appeared in my barn/garage one night when I got home, meowling at me: Help, I need a home! Can I trust you, human? – when he found himself in the house, fed and patted, he quickly concluded that the answer to that was yes, and proceeded to assess the situation. He was in a house; that was good. There was cat food in the house; this was also good. There was a human who patted cats in the house; this was also good. There were two female cats in the house! That was great! (Both spayed, but he didn’t appear to know that.) There were two male resident cats in the house. That was not good at all. But one of them was getting old, the other was a 9-month kitten, both of them were neutered, and neither of them was as big as he was. He would just beat them up until they moved out, and then everything would be fine.

I wasn’t worried he would kill them; but I was afraid the 9-month tom kitten actually would move out – this is normal pattern of behavior for cat colonies; new tom comes in or resident tom notices the kids are growing up, male adolescent kittens get the hell out of there and hope to survive until they’re old enough and big enough to be the new tom coming in somewhere else; and tomkitten was right about the age for it. And the New Tom was also quite literally trying to rape the female kitten, who wasn’t full grown and had just had abdominal surgery (the spaying); I had to yank him off her. (The older female cat told him to leave her the hell alone and he appeared to be respecting that; the kit didn’t know how to deal with him.) And I already had four cats; and I had a friend with only one. So I gave him to the friend – and, having been neutered, he then proceeded to get along fine with her Resident Tom.

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Be sure to put a little “fort” inside the crate for the new cat to hide in. S/he needs to be able to withdraw, not just from the resident cat’s paws and claws, but away from his field of vision as well.

You could just use a cardboard box and some blankets or towels.

And don’t forget the scratching board.

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Yesterday Rachel (the resident cat) was sniffing around the door as my husband was playing with the kittens. So he opened the door a crack, to let them interact with each other a bit.

Rachel watched for a while. One of the kittens came to the door to look at her. After a bit, he hissed.

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Progress!

Rachel’s decided she’s interested in the kittens. That is definitely progress.

The kitten may have hissed because he was being steadily stared at – that’s often a signal of aggression, in cats as in other creatures (including, in some contexts, in humans).

What did Rachel do when the kitten hissed?

ETA: if you can’t get any sign of preference from Rachel before you have to decide which to keep, I’d keep another female. While as in humans the individual differences overwhelm the averages, female cats usually play less aggressively than males. Multiple female cats are normal for a cat colony (though it’s also normal to have at least one tom around.)

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Rachel hung out at the door for a while, without hissing back. I agree. I thought it was promising that she was sniffing at the door and asking to be let in, and I thought the interaction went okay.

All four kittens are male. So we’ll be keeping two boys. They’ll be neutered in a couple of weeks. (Shelters neuter early. These ones are actually going longer than they like, due to trouble scheduling appointments.) At this point, we’ve developed preferences, and we will probably keep the kitten who hissed and another one who likes to sit on laps. I really want a lap cat. The two we will probably give to our friends are the most active and the least active. The most active is also the least likely to hang out in our laps. The least active seems sweet, and is in the running to stay here.

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The boys can wrestle with each other, which will take some of the impact of Overly Playful Kitten away from Rachel. So yes, if they’re all male, keeping two is a good idea.

And yes, if she stayed put after being hissed at, that’s encouraging – and not even hissing back is better yet!

70

Today went really well. We decided to bring a cat tree into the kitten room. We have three, and Rachel never uses any of them. I tricked the of them into the bathroom, and the other one escaped, but my husband trapped it in another bathroom. We brought the cat tree into the bedroom, and Rachel followed us.

I caught the kitten that had escaped, and brought it in. He ignored Rachel, and Rachel sometimes stared at him and sometimes ignored him. We eventually let a second kitten out of the bathroom. Rachel looked out the window and used a scratching post.

(Of course, this was HER room when she was the foster cat, not all that long ago, although she’d let much moved out before we started fostering other cats.)

My husband took out a cat tease, and the kittens chased it while Rachel watched. He gave Rachel a turn, and our sessile old cat played chase with a shiny thing on a string for a while. He traded off between the two for a bit.

One of the kittens approached Rachel and watched his back and fluffed up all his fur. My husband coaxed him away with the toy. Eventually, the other kitten approached Rachel, and after looking at him for a while, she hissed, and he politely moved away.

She hung out, using the scratching post, watching, and sometimes playing for a little bit after that, then went to the door. So i let her out.

(Then we released the other two kittens from the bathroom.)

This all seems fairly good. I’ve never had cats who didn’t grow up together get along to speak of, and we had a brother and sister where the brother sometimes brutally beat up his sister when he was mad at the third cat in the household.

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That is interesting; because I’ve had multiple cats at a time since the late 1970’s, and almost none of them had grown up together (the siblings in the story that I won’t tell all over again were an exception.) I knew a neighbor in the 70’s who had three cats, all littermates – and they all died in the same year, leaving her catless. After that I made as sure as possible of not having a year like that by always having cats of varying ages. Some of them I’ve brought into the house as kittens; some as adult cats. A few I got deliberately; others showed up on their own. And when I was a child, we nearly always had several cats, most of whom hadn’t grown up together. Over the years – that’s been a lot of cats.

And with the one exception I described earlier, they’ve all gotten along. Not always right away; and not every combination made close friends – but all of them well enough to at least occasionally sleep on the same bed. And quite a few of them have made close friends.

– I agree that your current introductions are going well. Give them all an extra pat from me!

72

Well, I’ve only really had two sets of cats. We got two same-age but unrelated kittens when my first cat died, and we lost both of those about the same time, and we got a pair, and one died quickly and we ended up replacing him with another pair of kittens, so we had three. Neither set enjoyed each other’s company after kitten-hood. We didn’t have a lot of fights or anything, but they kept their distance from each other most of the time, and pretty much only came together to eat wet catfood. We fed them their daily treat of wet food on a single plate at the advice of the vet, when they weren’t getting along. He was right that it helped.

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Shortly after my wife and I bought our house we became the repository for every cat that needed a home. When we moved in we had two cats, and it wasn’t long before we were up to about a dozen. My youngest brother gave us his cat because his new girlfriend didn’t like cats. Some friends had a cat that was being picked on by their other cats. A friend died and we ended up taking her two cats. My wife’s foster sister’s cat had a litter and two of them were born with only three legs which were going to be sent to a shelter which we were sure meant they were going to be put down as “unadoptable”. Etc, etc, etc. My wife used to joke that I had a sign that said Sucker on my forehead, visible only to cats.

In general all of the cats got along. There were the usual occasional spats, but they shared food bowls, our bed, and our laps indiscriminately. When my wife’s old cat went blind, one of the kittens from one of the three-legged cats started leading her around.

74

Arggh

Rachel is gone. I assume she sneaked out when the electricians were going in and out. :cry: They were good about closing the door, too, unlike a lot of the contractors.

She’s old and slow and doesn’t climb, and we have coyotes. I hope she’s okay, but I’m pessimistic.

I wonder if she left because she didn’t want to deal with the kittens.

:cry:

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My sympathies. I presume you’re checking out every place around the house where she might have gotten into, and put out some food for her. She may have just decided she needed a break from the kittens, but will come back after a bit.

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If she’s out, she may be really close to the house, but hiding.

And she may actually still be in, but hiding. Cats are extraordinarily good at hiding.

Your description of how she was acting around the kittens doesn’t seem to me like a cat who was going to decide to move out rather than deal with them; especially when she only had to move out of their room to avoid them.

Here’s hoping very hard that you find her soon, yawning at you on one side or the other of your doorstep, saying ‘I knew where I was all the time, what’s the fuss?’

– though in the meantime I’m sure I’d be checking and rechecking every place I could think of, in and out, with flashlight to peer into dark corners.

– are the contractors doing anything that could possibly have trapped her inside a wall or floor; bearing in mind that cats can get into really tiny openings? I once found cat eyes reflecting back at me from very far back inside the structure of the house, when a contractor had part of a floor up. Luckily, a bit of floor was still open, and with the contractor safely several hours’ worth of gone for the night the cat came to me and a can of tuna. (Otherwise, sorry everybody, but that floor would have come back up again – )

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I agree with thorny_locust, she didn’t seem really all that bothered by the kittens. Do you have any wet food or canned tuna you could put outside and sit and wait a bit? Or put a camera with motion detection on it to see if she comes back?

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Yup, doing that.

Also leaving the garage door open enough for her to get in it.

No, it was just electricians attaching fixtures to wires that they’d previously put in the wall.

She is very good at hiding, but it’s been a long time. Usually she’ll be batting at us, requesting that we watch her eat by now.

I have no idea why she suddenly got interested in going outdoors, but all week she’s been trying to make a run for it, and twice we caught her and dragged her back indoors. She is SO not an outdoor cat. Old, slow, possibly with some perceptual difficulties (she sometimes seemed to not realize we gave her fresh food if she didn’t watch us interact with it) and i never saw her climb higher than jumping onto my desk.

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I’m sorry puzzlegal, I hope you find her

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She’s back.

I called the police and they knew about “an older cat missing some teeth” picked up a few blocks from my house.

It seems she broke into the sun porch of a neighbor. The neighbor called the police. The police called the local animal shelter (who know her, and would have contacted us) but they were away this weekend. So she ended up at another shelter.

They checked her chip, but the chip is still registered to the women who surrendered her to the local animal shelter, with a note that she’d been given to the local shelter. So i guess if we’d done nothing at all they probably would have worked it out and contacted us tomorrow. But I’m glad she’s back. And she wasn’t eating at the shelter. She’s a very picky eater. Right now she’s eating her favorite food as my husband watches her.