Feral dogs and cats have a strong prey drive. If you bring (say) a ferret, bird, or pet rat into the house how do you teach the cat or dog it’s a pet, not prey?
Repeated applications of the spray bottle of justice and habituation. Even then, it should be assumed that supervision is necessary. Usually this kind of thing is easier if the animals were raised together. Even so, some animals like sighthounds are bred to take off after small fuzzy moving objects, so they may react before they can even think about it.
Some of them have a very good sense of what to kill, and what you’d be pissed about.
My parent’s cat was a deadly hunter, and living outdoors when we adopted him and forced him to be an outdoor cat. When he did get outside, you’d see him killing and eating something within 5 minutes. He killed and ate any mice that got in our house with gusto. Then my sister got some pet mice. They got out multiple times, and each time he brought us a pet mouse, alive and unharmed, in his mouth.
My older dog, on the other hand, doesn’t give a crap what I or anyone else thinks, and kills everything small enough to worry or shake to death (she is only 20 lbs, so my 8 and 10-lb cats don’t qualify - I got them both as little kittens and never left them alone together until the cats were over 5 lbs). She has killed young kittens, rats, a snake, an iguana, mice, even fish.
There are ways to deter hunting behavior, but if your dog or cat has a strong prey drive managing small animals in the same house is never going to be the same as the puppy and bunny who were raised together.
I’d really like to know. I don’t think my cocker spaniel ever figured out that she wasn’t supposed to chase my dachshund puppy.
It isn’t easy. One thing that should help is making it obvious you consider them another pack member. Rewarding them for tolerating them should be more effective than the spray bottle.
It’s going to depend very much on the individual dog (or cat) and their instincts primarily, with training secondary. My dogs are accustomed to living with cats, but two of the three will still chase (and probably kill) a strange cat, especially one silly enough to wander into “their” yard. They’ll certainly kill wild critters; my terrier cross kills mice, toads, garter snakes, whatever she can catch. They have an “out” command but in the heat of the chase …I don’t know. I did call the Rottweiler off a rabbit once while in full chase but I can’t guarantee I could do that every time! The lab would probably bring me an unharmed critter, he is typical lab and very gentle and soft-mouthed.
Dogs with an overall high level of training are more likely to respect your wishes not to treat a cat or rabbit or hamster as prey. A combination of positive reinforcement for wanted behaviour and negative for unwanted behaviour works for me. A new cat in the house last fall: lots of praise for acting unconcerned and relaxed about the cat. A stern out! for any predatory body language. Gorman the cat is still here and the dogs mostly ignore the cats in the house. It helped greatly that my two cats are calm and not likely to run and squeak at the sight of dogs. If Gorman had acted like that the dogs wouldn’t have been so good about leaving him alone.
I can’t imagine successfully training my cats not to chase, say, a loose bird or pet mouse.
My big dogs have never shown any inclination to hurt/kill my small dogs or cats, all co-exist peacefully. I would not trust ANY of my animals with a rodent type pet, bird, reptile, etc. I think they would make short work of it.
Both of my cats are rescues, and have high prey drive. When I did have pet mice they were obsessed with trying to get them. And when I first got my tiny little Papillon puppy, she weighed about 2 lbs. My cats, especially the big male most definitely looked upon her as PREY. I did not dare leave them alone together, ever. I have no doubt he would have easily killed her. Now that she is grown, however, they play together. 
Ferrets are carnivores easily capable of killing or seriously injuring animals many times their own size. If a cat or small dog doesn’t immediately realize that a ferret is not prey, the ferret will soon teach it otherwise.
A cat or a dog is still to big for a ferret. My waify old cat used to swat my ferret away like it was nothing.
My cats pretty much treat the ferrets like other cats. They’ll lay down next to each other or even eat out of the same food bowl. It probably helps that I adopted both cats when they were small kittens, so they were about the same size as the ferrets when they were introduced and quickly learned that the ferrets were mean if you messed with them. The cats will give the ferrets an occasional swat, but never with claws out.
If anything, it’s the ferrets that play too rough. They like to bite cat ears, which the cats don’t enjoy very much. The cats will just escape by jumping up on something tall if the ferrets are being annoying.
It depends on the cat and the ferret. As other ferret owners will attest (and indeed have attested in the other thread I linked to), it’s possible for a ferret to injure or completely dominate a cat. A cat can swat all they want, but a ferret isn’t going to let go if its got its jaws locked around the cat’s neck. I’ve had to pry mine off a few cats myself; for some reason she absolutely hates cats and attacks them on sight. She’s a real sweetie around dogs, though, and will play with them gently.
Some people do have both cats and rats, and the cats can clearly be taught to tolerate the rats. In fact, they sometimes get along quite well. I’ve never had cats so I couldn’t explain how, but I’ve been told it helps to introduce a kitten to fully-grown rats. Since pet rats have heartbreakingly short lifetimes, the cat will likely encounter juvenile rats later, but apparently keeps the “rats are friends, not food” training even when meeting little squeakers.
I would still supervise them, regardless. The cat could kill a rat, and the rats can bite hard enough to injure a cat.
Our dog and parrot just ignored each other, except sometimes if the parrot was screeching too much, the dog would leave in exasperation. Every once in a while the parrot would attempt to groom the dog, and she would just twitch and move over until the bird got distracted by something else.
That dog passed away earlier this year, and one of the issues we’re going to have to deal with as we look for a new one is how well it will get along with the bird.
Some dogs appear to accept birds as playmates, but I would never be comfortable letting them romp together like in this video.
(bolding mine)
Having been around cats and ferrets being introduced to each other, multiple times, I’ll add one thing: ferrets smell like the obligate carnivores they are. They don’t smell like something that eats grass and flowers, and I swear every cat being introduced for the first time recognizes that. They tend to go: “Oooh, small furry, I’m gonna eat y- Wha?? Ew. You’re not a tasty bunny.”
Concur. A couple of years ago we brought into the house an abandoned neighborhood cat whose human had moved away. While he was outside roaming the neighborhood, Sadie, our AmStaff/hound mix, exhibited completely predatory behavior toward him, including lunges to the end of her leash.
When we brought him inside, we carefully worked with Sadie to show her we approved of the cat as a pack member. This consisted of one human cuddling the cat (frankly an iffy prospect when he was semi-feral, as my series of rabies shots demonstrates) while the other human steadied Sadie with a gentle hand on her collar and repeated instructions (mostly “easy” and “friend”). Sadie is highly attuned to her humans, and she quickly realized that she shouldn’t eat this cat – but she struggled with her instinct sometimes, and we’d have to hiss SADIE! suddenly to snap her out of a predatory gaze.
Gradually she increasingly ignored the cat entirely. Then one evening the cat was charging around the house playing crazy. Simone, the other dog, an American Pit Bull Terrier, had not exhibited any interest in hurting the cat intentionally, but she had been interested in the cat in a “play with me” way, and she was strong enough to hurt him even accidentally. Simone was attracted to the idea of running around the house like crazy, and she took off after the cat suddenly when he caromed past.
I doubt Simone meant any harm – she loves to play chase games with a partner – but Sadie was a different matter. She sized up the situation instantly, and appeared to decide “if one of us is going to kill that cat I’ll be damned if I let Simone beat me to it.” As the cat rocketed past her, Sadie lunged and pinned him to the wall with her snout. Only our combined scream of SADIE!!! froze her in her tracks before she opened her jaws.
The cat was not visibly hurt except for his dignity, and Sadie immediately backed off, because she wants to please the pack first and foremost. Simone had great difficulty gearing down out of “run around like a nutball” mode, but the cat’s raised paw brought her to a hard, butt-on-the-ground stop just short of being clawed in the nose.
Conclusion: Sadie has been socialized to tolerate the cat as long as she can pretend to ignore him (it’s hilarious now when he rubs affectionately along her flank and she ignores him with studied desperation) but her instinct to strike and kill is buried down there somewhere and might come out in moments of excitement. And Simone has definitely figured out that the cat is pointy – now when she tries to investigate him too closely, he indolently raises a paw that’s not even aimed at her, and she backs away in awe.
We keep them in different rooms when we’re not home.
We now have added Abbie the hamster to our menagerie. Several heavily-monitored attempts to socialize Sadie with the hamster in exactly the same way she learned to tolerate the cat have, so far, appeared to be failures. I say “appeared” because Sadie is intensely interested in Abbie and licks her lips constantly while gazing at her. We have, so far, declined to see what she might do.
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I know this look, and that’s a perfect description!
Two previous dogs, a Rottweiler and a GSDx, were exactly as you describe Sadie. Complete with the studious “that’s not a cat touching me that’s not a cat touching me, lalalala, there is no cat here” expression. I think it’s a testament to most dogs’ generous good nature that they’re able to repress urges so well.
Perhaps it’s because dogs recognise cats as fellow carnivores, or because we humans tend to have somewhat more complex relationships with household cats and the dogs pick up on this…but I cannot imagine successfully introducing a rabbit, hamster or other exclusively prey-type animal to the house. Many years ago I had a giant French Lop who sometimes came inside. She intimidated the dogs, but those particular dogs were rather laid back without much of an urge to chase things.
I did some research on this before we got chickens. We have three dogs and cat, and one of our dogs, Mirabel, loved to chase birds. She was particularly aggressive towards stray chickens we’d see when we were out walking.
I found a video of some program…dog whisperer, maybe?..where the guy was training a problematic dog not to attack the owner’s chicken. Basically, he claimed the chicken as his own…the dog was not to touch it, because it was HIS chicken. So, we got our chickens, and I did the same thing and it worked perfectly. The dogs barely even look at the chickens, and I let them out together unsupervised all the time. I don’t know if it’s just that they see the chickens as part of the pack, or if they really got that the chooks belong to the alpha, but it worked.
I’ll back this one up. Same scenario except it was with a clever pet gerbil we’d been trying to locate for a week. Merlyn the cat hunted him down inside the house and brought him to us totally unharmed at bedtime one night.
Could be recognition of the human’s alpha-ness and the cat not wanting to violate territory or property of his superiors. Or maybe he knew what was prey and what was family.
My husband’s family had an English setter who was trained as a hunting retriever, so he had a “soft mouth”; he wouldn’t bite or overtly harm anything he was supposed to retrieve.
He was also territorial. A neighbor’s cat came into their yard, and the dog ran it down and pinned the cat down, then started mouthing it. A lot. And that dog was a drooler. My husband heard pitiful meowing from outside and went out to find a saliva-soaked cat looking miserable, and a confused-looking dog who wasn’t entirely sure what to do outside of trying his best to “hold” the cat between his jaws (cat was on the ground, not picked up). Upon the “drop it” command, the cat fled immediately after release.
I was still a girlfriend at the time, and visited with my first ferret in a little cage. It was obvious from the dog’s demeanor (both when the ferret was in the cage and out) that he understood that the ferret ‘belonged to’ the alpha person, but that he didn’t like that fact. We left the ferret in his cage, and returned later to find a miserable ferret, wet with urine. Lots of urine. Not his own urine. The dog had expressed his opinion of the little interloper in a way that wouldn’t get him in too much trouble. 
When I was a kid, I got a pet hamster, already having a cat in the house. A few times the hamster got out, and the cat would chase it, corner it, but do nothing else. I never put any real effort into acclimating them towards each other, but the cat just knew not to harm it. This cat was an indoor/outdoor cat and hunted mice frequently.