We’ve got two cats–one older, one younger. The older grew up with no other cats around; the younger’s been exposed to the older ever since she was a kitten. The older is declawed; the younger isn’t.
The problem here is that the younger cat takes great delight in tormenting the older–chasing around the house, driving up onto high things (the younger cat is not much of a jumper), all with plenty of hissing, yowling, and spitting from the older cat. A certain amount might’ve been play, but this doesn’t seem to come off that way.
Does anyone have any suggestions about how we can curb the behaviour of the younger cat here? I’m not necessarily looking for them to fall in love with each other (though hey, it’d be nice!:)), but I’d like to see the older cat get a little bit of peace.
Have you tried shooting the younger cat with a water gun when he harasses the older cat? This is kind of negative reinforcement often works in discouraging bad cat behavior without hurting the cat.
Good luck to you. I hope your cats work it out. Usually they do eventually, I find.
Well how long have they been together? Who was there first? The older cat is going to feel especially defenseless being declawed. It’s just going to take time really…
I’ve experienced similar problems before over my decades of living with cats. The fact that the elder is declawed makes it especially difficult for him.
One of them, presumably the younger, will have to be adopted out. There is no other real solution. The younger will be full of energy and combative playfulness for years to come and will continue to torment the elder to an early grave.
Declawing the younger will not work as the energy and combativeness will still be there…aside from all the other good reasons for not declawing cats.
Do you have a large enough home that you can keep them in seperate rooms at all times and the doors closed? That might be a compromise.
My suggestion for your future: When you adopt a kitten, adopt them in pairs. They will play with each other, fight with each other, and be accustomed to having another cat around as they grow older. (Don’t bring in a second kitten now, the two younger will simply gang up on the old guy.)
Sorry I don’t have a more helpful suggestion. If Mrs. S and I weren’t already at the legal limit for our municipality, I’d offer to adopt the younger one.
We’ve had a great deal of success getting cats of different ages used to each other by using a product called Feliway. Apparently, it is a feline pheromone, and has the effect of calming everybody down–not to a lethargic state, but just enough that nobody is going out of their way to bother anybody else.
It is simple enough to use: it’s like a Glade plug-in room deodorizer. Humans cannot smell a thing, but the cats know it’s there. Anyway, it might be worth looking into, before you consider other options.
We’ve tried the classic squirtgun route–the trouble is that it requires eternal vigilance, with squirter always strapped to your waist. As to the cats working it out–well, I think we hoped for that also. But it’s been four years now, and if anything, Little Cat is only getting more aggressive towards Mayhem.
They’ve been together as long as the younger, Litttle Cat, has been in the house–about four years, if memory serves. Mayhem, the elder, spent her first three years as an only cat with me while I was in school.
I’ll look into this Feliway thing, Spoons. It presumably can’t hurt to check it out before considering any more radical options.
Do they have separate litter boxes? Separate scratching posts? Separate windowsills of sunny delight? Separate food and water dishes? Some cats simply cannot abide sharing. Ours are like that. Once we figured that out, the sibling rivalry decreased dramatically. All we did was provide duplicate everythings, and they sorted out whose was whose. Don’t try to interfere with that process - it will make little sense to you. (For example, the food dish in the pantry is “hers”, while the water fountain next to it is “his”. The food dish in the foyer is “his”, while she likes that fountain better. We tried moving the fountains, but they switched preferences, still spliting up what we intended as a set. Stupid critters.)
Both of our cats are clawed, but the older one is…to put it indelicately…a pussy. The younger one used to bully him something awful. Turns out she just wanted him away from “her” stuff.