Cat rearing advice

In My Humble Opinion
1

I know this is often a contentious topic here, but hear me out.

I recently divorced. My wife got my two dogs. One of the dogs is a cat killer. She has at least 7 to her name, so she needs to live in a cat free house.

My children wanted cats. I went to a cat rescue organisation with them and we got a four month old brother/sister combination, about a month ago. As is usual with rescues they are sterilised, vaccinated etc. I have owned cats before including a total asshole who lived with me for 17 years (I loved him, despite his evil ways)

So now I have 2 x 5 month cats. They currently live in my bedroom, they have a litter tray in the en-suite bathroom.

I want to do three things.

First, get them used to humans. I live alone. Being rescues, they have seen humans but did not get much direct attention. The male is fine with me, comes to me when he feels like a little attention, but the female is ok with me being in the room, but not with any affection. She has her brother for that, I suppose. But as these cats are technically my children’s pets, and they only see the kids every second weekend, both hideaway when my kids - noisy 6 and 8 year olds turn up. I would really like the female to become accustomed to me, ie approaching me for attention, not spending most of her time in hiding. I would really like both cats to be chilled with humans, even if those humans are loud and energetic.

Second, get them used to the house. I live in a huge house, because my sister bought it and plans to do extensive renovations next year and she let me stay for free. (I will move out with the cats to a cat-safe rental).But in such a huge house there are hundreds of places a cat can hide, and the girl is very inventive. I think the male is ready but not certain the female is ready to be let out into the wonderland… advice on this would be good.

Third, and probably a little contentious: I would like them to be inside/outside cats. I live on a large property, far from streets, and frankly I hate the smell of the litterbox. Once the cats can navigate the house, locate their food and litterbox, and have enough familiarity with me as their food provider and friend, I plan to let them out into the garden. How soon, though? I can induce them back inside with treats, assuming the female at that point in the next few months is less wary of me. I’m not letting her out until she actively seeks attention from me.

So… advice?

2

If you have food motivated cats you can do anything with them. Let dinner time pass by. Wait 30 mins and go in with sardines or tuna and she’ll be eating out of your hand in minutes.
Do this every other day or so and you’ll be their best friend. Kids can be taught to do it. Quietly at first. You’ll have to supervise.

I’m ok with indoor/outdoor cats. I’m with you on waiting awhile tho’

If the female hides in the house and can’t get outside or in an inaccessible attic I think you’re ok to let them roam the house. Hunger will bring them out eventually.

Good luck.

3

You shouldn’t be. Keep your cats indoors or, at most, a fenced yard they cannot escape from.

Cats are lethal to so many animals.

A 2013 study by Scott R. Loss and others of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that free-ranging domestic cats are likely the top human-caused threat to birds and small mammals in the United States, killing an estimated 1.3 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals annually.[5][6] These figures were much higher than previous estimates for the U.S.[5]: 2 Unspecified species of birds native to the U.S. and mammals including mice, shrews, voles, squirrels and rabbits were considered most likely to be preyed upon by cats.[5]: 4 Perhaps the first U.S. study that pointed to predation by cats on wildlife, as a concern was ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush’s 1916 report for the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, The Domestic Cat: Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wildlife: Means of Utilizing and Controlling It.[7] - SOURCE

FTR: I have had many cats in my life and loved them. This is not a cat hating thing. Just be a responsible owner. Your cats can be completely happy as indoor only cats.

4

Eh, it depends on the cat. Not that I want to hijack my own thread, but my 17-year cat managed 3 small baby field mice and one baby dove in his time. He was just not interested in hunting.

OTOH my family when I was growing up had a cat that took down a juvenile wild hare, roughly the same size as him. Then ate it. Cats vary.

My cat-killer dog is also a rat-killer, I can’t count how many she has dispatched.

5

One of these and an extra unit on elastic collars:

Then you can find both cats anywhere indoors. I don’t think they should be let out if you are moving in a few months.
The children must learn to be gentle if they want to lure the cats out.

6

The tags sound like a great idea, and by coincidence the cost is almost exactly what I have in GB£ in my Paypal accout, untouched for about 8 or 9 years. I’ll have to revive that.

Once they get the run of the house I’ll move the litter box out of my room. I think you are right about keeping them in until I move (and for some time after that while they settle in to a new place)

I’m not married to the idea of indoor/outdoor cats, I could manage indoor only, but I enjoy the great outdoors so it feels a little unkind.

7

Remember the elastic collars part. Trust me, you will rather find a collar without cat than a choked cat with collar. (It hasn’t happened to me, but I have seen pictures.)

8

I have elastic collars. I don’t think you can buy anything else at a petshop.

For my asshole cat mentioned in my post above I wanted to get him a goth collar with spikes on (he was black, it suited his personality) but the goth shops had no idea how to make it and the cat shops did not serve that clientele.

These two have elastic collars with info about their microchip (pink for the boy, purple for the girl - kids!) And I will get small tags with my phone number before they get let outside my bedroom - cats are escape artists and my children cannot be guaranteed to close doors.

That is also partially why I want cats that can get outside but absolutely know their way home.

9

Good, I have once had nonelastic collars from an online petshop. They went into the garbage immediately.

10

There is such a thing as a “breakaway collar” or safety buckle, quick release, etc. You can tell because it will open under moderate tension, with no further manipulation required. Better than a simple elastic.

Some cats will decimate rats, birds (especially if their mother taught them how to hunt and kill) but not necessarily a majority or random housecats. However, another consideration is other cats, dogs, and also coyotes, jackals, raptors, owls, or whatever you have around.

11

Do you have friends who will come visit you and play with the cats, starting with sitting non-threateningly in a room with hiding cats in it? That would help them get used to a variety of people.

The children will have to learn how to coax cats and how not to frighten them. They’re old enough to be learning this, though it might take a while. (I think I was around 7 or 8 when I finally got it through my head that the way to catch a cat is not to chase it.) The cats need to be able to get away from them at all times, and the children must learn not to chase them. You should supervise to start with – one aggressive chase can undo months of work.

At first, let or make the cats stay in their familiar room, and have the children come in for brief periods of time; sit quietly on the floor on the far side of the room from whatever the cats are hiding under or on top of (make sure the cats have things in the room that they can hide under and on top of! cats must always have a place to hide); and play, fairly quietly, with something also interesting to cats – roll a ball back and forth between them, for instance. The cats may remain entirely invisible the whole time when you first do this. They’re extremely likely to come out eventually. Getting a six-year-old and an eight-year-old not to squee out loud and/or bounce at the cats when this happens may not be easy; but try.

I wouldn’t let them out of the one room until they seem quite comfortable in it, including with you in there. If the layout of the house permits, I’d then let them gradually into increasing portions of the house, instead of giving them the run of the whole place as soon as they get out of the one room – can you shut off that floor of the house, for instance, and let them first into one additional room, then another? if you can’t shut off the stairs, can you shut off most of the individual rooms, so that at first they can get at their own room, the stairhall, and maybe one or two more rooms, and then gradually open more doors every few days? If it’s a one story house, again, can you shut off most of the rooms at first? And definitely, if at all possible, keep attics and basements closed off to start with!

Whether you can let them out safely depends a whole lot on the location, the local wildlife, and the particular cats. An intermediary possibility, if you wind up somewhere where you can build one, is a fenced outdoor enclosure – it needs to be fenced over the top as well as on the sides.

12

Are you going to put netting across the entirety of the fence to the house? Good luck.

I’m sorry, but they are part of the eco system of predator and prey. 1-4 billion birds in the US killed out of an estimated 20+billion birds in the US, doesn’t seem to be threatening extinction.

13

Regarding indoor/outdoor, it seems to me it depends on the cat too. My cat, she’s 10, really doesn’t like to go outside. If I try to get her to come outside, it’s only with great trepidation, and I’m not really interested in her going outside, but as a test, she’ll eventually sniff around outside and then run back inside. And that’s fine with me.

So, your cats may not want to go outside. I guess it depends upon the cat’s upbringing and personality.

14

If he starts out letting them go outside, they will easily adapt to being indoor/outdoor cats.

15

I seriously didn’t know that such a thing existed.

16

It has happened:

17

My previous asshole cat was once doing his gentlemanly toilet when my landlady’s dogs heard some noise at the gate. He was suprised as they came around the corner, and bolted up a tree.

I had to climb the tree to get him down, just as I reached the branch he was on, I discovered he had completed his shit aerially… with my hand. He then by his own choice became an indoor cat.

About a year later, I moved to a flat in the 5th floor, and my “indoor” cat now walked narrow balconies to visit the neighbours with impunity. I moved again, to a ground floor flat and he quickly found neighbours who were good for snacks, so he was an indoors/outdoors cat again.

I got one dog, then another, and that cat was the ultimate boss in my house. The cat killer never got near thinking about bothering him, she was totally submissive.

18

I accidentally posted this in the wrong thread

19

It’s quite possible to make a fenced yard that cats can’t get out of. My parents had one for years; it was about 10’ x 25’ and contained a chunk of healthy mixed-species lawn and the trunk of a small tree. (The wire over the top of the enclosure had to be around the tree trunk in such a fashion that the cats couldn’t get through – and cats can get through astonishingly small spaces. I don’t remember just how it was done, and it probably needed to be adjusted about once a year as the tree grew; I wasn’t living there, and don’t remember just how that worked.) Their cats loved it. It was easy to get them in at night, though – just turn on the lawn sprinklers.

This is true; but location matters. In my area, most (not all) of the native bird predators have been driven out; and I’m providing a great deal of varied habitat for many species. In some areas, specific species are at unusually high risk from cats, and cats shouldn’t be allowed outside there – and probably a very great deal of what humans do shouldn’t be allowed, either. In some areas, cats are at high risk from birds, and/or other wildlife, and/or free-roaming dogs.

Human-caused habitat loss is the underlying problem. Cats have been running loose outdoors in North America for hundreds of years – and for most of that time it didn’t remotely occur to most people to shut them inside. The species that got wiped out, on the continent, were wiped out by humans.

This is also true. Some of them don’t much care either way; some strongly prefer to stay in; and some want so badly to get out that they turn into amazing escape artists – and if they then succeed in getting out are more likely to get into trouble outside, because they haven’t been able to learn their way around. I have carried new residents carefully around the outside of the house and brought them back in before I actually let them out, so they could find out what the place looked like from the outside and knew at least one spot to get back in. – most cats seem to have some idea of this themselves; a cat who’s decided to keep living here will often, when first let back out, explore slowly and carefully right around the house and then gradually increase their roaming area. A cat who, when let out the door, makes a beeline away from the house may be trying to head back to its previous location. Grab that cat if you can and bring back inside for another couple of weeks.

@Omar_Little: Nice – for climbing space, snoozing surfaces, light, and air. Nothing alive in there (except presumably sometimes the cats), though – no grass, no herbs, no soil, no tree trunk. I suspect that it varies how much that matters depending on the cat, though.

Small island location. (And not only one cat; though the location’s got more to do with it.) There certainly are places where cats shouldn’t be let loose.

20

If you sleep with therm, they will get used to you. Give them treats.

Inside/outside cats have about half the lifespan on inside only.

But is there wildlife? Coyotes like to eat cats when the coyote is hungry.

My neighbor had two cats- brother & sister. They were allowed out only during the day. After a short time the brother disappeared mysteriously. Coyotes? Ran over? Ran away? trapped and killed? who knows, but we live in a cul-de-sac at the very end of a road, next to hills etc.

We put the litter boxes in the bathrooms. Scoop 2x a day.

There’s that also.

Well, the house cat is an invasive species in America. When fed at home, they like to kill for play.