[QUOTE=jsgoddess]
Well, I’m going to be a bit of a wet blanket about this. If you’re “getting rid” of a cat because of conflict, adding a different cat is fraught with potential complications.
What do you mean by getting rid of cat #2, by the way? And what have you tried to work things out?
[/QUOTE]
It’s a bit of a long story, so if you really want to know, bear with me.
The short version of it, if you want to skip the babble, is that the second cat just isn’t fitting into our home.
We got the girl cat about six months ago, and we left her roam around our place, explore it, and get comfortable with us and her new home. She seemed to really enjoy being with us, and especially bonded with me. A couple of months after that, we cat-sat for a friend of ours who was going on vacation for a few weeks. We slowly introduced the cats, as we had no idea how my little girl would react to another cat. The cat we were cat-sitting was male, and was also around her age, give or take a few months. At first, there was some hissing and cautious swiping, but they got over that in less than a week and got along like best buddies after that. At the end of the other cat’s stay, she was grooming him and snuggling with him.
He then had to go back to his owners, and we noticed that our cat wasn’t as happy without another cat to keep her company. We were in the middle of discussing the possibility of another cat when one caught my SO’s eye. He was a bit older, around nine years old. He was very snuggly at the shelter and when we let him out of the cage to play with us, he was very active and he didn’t seem to mind when a cat in another cage hissed at him. We thought he would be a great contribution to our family of cats, so we adopted him.
We did all the normal introductions with the cats, and my little girl hissed up a storm at first, but we thought she would grow out of it. She wouldn’t, so we had to keep them separate for a long time, longer than we did with the cat we were cat-sitting. Eventually, they got used to each other’s scent and was able to co-exist while supervised. Eventually, we trusted them enough to leave them alone, or so we thought.
They were okay for a couple of weeks, but one day, one cat must have looked at the other cat funny or something, because we came home to find tuffs of fur from both cats everywhere. I checked both cats to make sure they weren’t bleeding or anything (they weren’t) and separated them again. I was getting a little worried about my girl cat’s behaviour, because I talked to some more experienced cat people, and she’s spayed, not normally territorial, and got along fine with a previous cat. I was told that while the girl cat may get along fine with other cats, she probably just didn’t like the one we brought home for no reason other than she just doesn’t like him.
Besides that, I have a very different way of raising my animals. Although I acknowledge that cats are very independant, I like establishing rules like no scratching the furniture, feeding will be done on my time, and no running outside when we open the screen door. The second cat has done all these things despite trying to reinforce that it is not okay for him to do so. When he scratches the furniture, I walk up to him, hold his body down to stop him, say loudly and firmly “NO!” and then show him his catpost. We’ve been trying to do this for a while, and he does go to his post sometimes, but when he thinks we’re not looking, he goes back to scratching the furniture because it’s more convenient for him. He begs for food when it’s not feeding time, which is okay, because my girl cat begs too, but the problem is that my girl cat usually have some food in her bowl all the time; she’s just a slow eater and takes her time. He frequently steals from her bowl and despite being sprayed with water and scruffed when he does so, he keeps doing it. He’s also tried escaping several times. Lucky for us, he’s so fat that he can’t run really fast or really far, so we’ve managed to snag him when he bolts out. Despite the hot weather, we now have to keep all our doors shut, even the screen door, because he knows how to manuver it open and run out. He may be just really slow at learning, or he’s too old to learn, but my SO and I, as much as we love our animals, can’t spend forever teaching him how to behave in our household.
We both feel that he isn’t the right fit for our home, and he deserves to be with a family that can give him the attention he needs. He is a cat that should probably be in a home as the only cat, as he likes attention very much, and acts out when he doesn’t get it. His personality just isn’t right for me or my SO or my little girl cat.
Given all this though, our little girl cat really does enjoy the company of another cat around, just not the one we brought home, for whatever reason. So, a kitten, a blank slate, one that can be taught and molded to fit all our personalities. We know that there will be some crazy kitten antics, and some frustration in teaching him what is right and wrong, but it will be a lot less aggravating for all of us.