I was watching this YouTube and obviously the male cat is being a jerk to his sister.
You can tell they aren’t just playing around.
I was wondering for dog or cat owners. If you have two cats or dogs and they are acting like this, as long as they don’t draw blood or something like that is it best, just to leave them alone and let them work out for themselves who’s the boss?
Cat owner checking in. I’ve always let the cats work things out for themselves, unless they’re drawing blood or otherwise threatening serious injury. Fighting is one of those things cats do, and you can’t be around all the time to stop them. It’s almost always harmless.
Yeah, I just let 'em wrestle, unless I think somebody’s going to get hurt. I do stop things when my dog is trying to play with the cats and the cats start clawing the air, because I’m afraid they might get a nasty lesson if they ever connected.
When it’s just the cats working out their dominance issues (which almost always consists of the females hissing and swatting at the males–or sometimes at each other), I let them work it out. When one cat has another cornered, I usually break it up, just to get it over with.
We’ve only had one serious cat fight (blood and such) I can remember, and I did interfere with that one and put the cats in separate rooms for a few hours.
But I have two dogs that are much larger than the cats (80 pounds or so). If one of them snaps at a cat, I yell at the dog. They know that’s not allowed, and they’re breaking the rules by doing it.
When it’s my own pets, I generally let them work things out on their own. There’s a local stray tomcat, though, that likes to pick on my dog when she’s in the yard (she’s terrified of him, even though she weighs 50 pounds and the cat probably weighs around 10). He gets the hose.
So you all would say the video I linked to, you’d just have left them alone?
I recall when I was a kid, my dog had my cat against a wall and “woofed” at her. He was a collie/shepherd and she was a tuxedo cat. She swiped at him with her claws and poked a little hole in his nose (tiny bit of blood) and ran away. After that the cat and dog just ignored each other, pretending the other doesn’t exist.
I sometimes watch my neighbors two dogs when they go out for the weekend, it’s funny 'cause they young one totally bosses the old dog around. It was really funny when the young one was a small puppy and he’d just boss the big dog. He’d push him out of his food bowl and everything. Even if there were two bowls, the pup had to eat first. The young one will push the older dog right out of the way and the older dog just accepts it as if to say “Well that’s life.”
The only time the old man puts up a fight is when they play. After 15 minutes, the older dog walks away and the young one usually finds other things to do. And if the young one persues the old one to play. The older dog will give him a vicious growl and show his teeth as if to say “I’ve played with you enough.” And the young one leaves. But they never get physical.
I’m at work and not gonna watch the video right now, so I can’t comment on the specifics of what’s happening there, but for the most part, cats and dogs have their little dominance hierarchy set up, and it’s up to them to decide who’s who, since they’re the ones that have to follow that rule.
I’ve seen people introduce a new cat, the original cat gets all huffy, and in three minutes the owners are wailing that “they’ll kill each other!!” I always tell them to wait it out, and I haven’t been wrong yet. 
Cats will start out all hissy and spitty and swatty, and after a couple of (days, weeks, maybe months but that’s rare) they’re doing a good job of ignoring each other, and after a couple of (days, weeks, months) you’ll catch them licking each other when they think no one’s looking.
Prolly the same w/dogs, but I have more experience with the pussy. 
Absolutely. I didn’t see anything at all unusual in that video–we’ve got three cats (two that we got together as kittens, and a third adopted later). That sort of lazy prodding, pawing, circling, punctuated by the occasional tackle and roll, etc. happens about three times an hour in my house. It’s part dominance exercise (totally normal), and part play, but it’s not serious violence.
When we first brought the third cat in, it was a little different in that there definitely was some unfriendly/aggressive language, body and otherwise. The hisses sounded completely different, the baring of teeth was different. More like the cat from Pet Semetary than the YouTube video there. Way more intense. And of course, they all got over it in a couple of weeks and they’re best buds. But they do that stuff like in the YouTube vid many, many times every day.
I see this sort of thing from my gang on a daily basis. I don’t even think it’s a dominance thing necessarily. It’s sparring. It’s how they play. The only one who hisses is my calico, but it hardly means anything when she does it. Our other cat Jet likes to tackle and bite Tommy on the neck, sometimes for several long moments at time, while making a horrendous yowling noise. You’d think he was being torn apart, even though he’s the one doing the biting. Sometimes they even get puffty tails, but no one is really upset, because no one runs away, no blood is drawn, and they always end amicably.
Can’t hold cats to human standards of physical interaction. They bite and tackle each other, hiss, yowling, etc., but it’s all in good fun, IME. When they are really upset, the sounds they make are much more distressing.
Absolutely! That’s what we call WCW (world cat wrestling) at our house. Nothing serious, nothing to worry about.
Notice the lack of fear/anger signs: no puffed-up tails, no hissing, the ears aren’t laid back except during the close contact (to keep them safe), the female cat didn’t flip rightside up to fight, none of the paw strikes were serious, none of the bites went to the neck, the female cat didn’t get underneath and rake with the back paws, and the claws were mostly sheathed.
Definitely not a real fight.
I disagree completely. There’s no biting, clawing, or actual fighting in that video. For most of it, the white cat is lying on her back and batting the other one’s face. This is not fighting, it is perfectly normal inter-cat rough-housing. There may be an aspect of dominance play involved. (I don’t know if cats have as highly developed social hierarchy as dogs; my impression is that they are a lot less socially complex overall.) But it’s nothing to be concerned about.
Yeah, you know if they’re serious because they puff their tails up. Mine also make ambulance noises when they’re really upset.
I asked 'cause normally when I see cat’s playing their whiskers are way out in front of their fade. When they get mad the whiskers go back.
They have other cats boxing on YouTube and you can see the whiskers in those videos are way sticking out front. My cat was like that, when she was ready to have a fight with my hand the whiskers would stick out in front of her face
So that is why to me it look like the male cat asserting himself over his sister, rather than actually play fighting.
Eh, they’re just horsing around. If they weren’t just playing, the white cat wouldn’t have stayed all flopped over in the box while the gray one moved around. She would have either gotten into a better fighting position or run off.
My older cat does this with both our younger cat and the older dog–she lies on her back yowling and batting, then continues to lie there while they stop to chew themselves, move to a better vantage, etc. When she’s not in the mood to deal with them, she either claws them up or runs off at the first opportunity.
And yes, you should always let them sort it out themselves as long as they don’t damage each other over much.
Neither of those cats looked very worked up. She didn’t even bother to get out of the box.
I guess if someone with the name Crazy Cat Lady says so, than that is it
I have two cats, an 8-year-old male and a 2-year-old female. They have at least 1-2 major fights a day. I always say they “fight like dogs,” because it really looks like they’re out to kill each other. I used to try to separate them, but it’s futile since they’ll only go to a different part of the house and resume the fight.
The thing is, 3 minutes after the fight, they’re sleeping together or grooming each other.
Oh, and by the way, more often than not, it’s the female who initiates the fight.
With dogs, I periodically break it up even when there’s no problem.
When the dogs are wrestling around, they aren’t paying much attention to me, and I can slip in and touch them both, say their names, and tell them to cool it, and they do.
You see, the pack leader moderates the amount of fighting that’s allowed in the pack. By stepping into that role while the dogs are distracted, I gently reinforce my position as pack leader without having to be hostile or dominant. They accept it completely naturally. I do it occasionally just to remind them, and it helps keep them from getting too wound up and putting marks on each other.
Heh, yes, ambulance noises. At my house, with three cats, the only one that gets seriously narked off is Molly–complete with hisses, spits, and ambulance noises. She’s easy to scare/provoke, so the boys like to pick on her. In return, she’s learned to stay the heck out of their way, or else let them know before they start that she’s in a seriously not-gonna-put-up-with-it mood. Sometimes I interfere, just because it does upset Molly, and Rio will occasionally actually pull her fur out.
When one of the boys decides to pick on the other, it usually ends up in WCW action, as Invisible Wombat puts it. Usually ends up in Rio running away from Punky, because Rio is young, and likes to start stuff, but Punky is bigger, and experienced.
With dogs, I’m much more likely to interfere, but only if it looks dangerous–for example, the dogs are mismatched in size/aggressiveness.