Looking for advice on integrating two cats
Hello,
I have looked up a number of articles on this but I thought coming straight to the people might be a better approach:
My brother and his fiancée had to re-home one of their cats recently because it wasn't getting along with their other cats. For background, this cat is the sweetest, most affectionate cat I've ever met. He is also huge. But for whatever reason he let himself get bullied by a smaller cat.
This cat, named Bane, lived happily with other cats with my brother's fiancée for years. It wasn't until my brother and his fiancée moved in together, and the aforementioned problem cat moved in as well, that things went bad.
So Bane ended up first burrowing (literally) into a couch to avoid the other cat and then eventually migrated to the rafters of the basement. After they realized that he wasn't getting down to use the litter box and was literally sleeping in his own waste, they put him in a guest bedroom with all of his own stuff. But they knew that this wasn't a good life for him, so eventually we adopted him.
The problem of course is that we do have a cat of our own already. We think it will work because he was alright with other cats for years and only ever had the problems with the one new cat. But so far, he seems very scared of our cat. He hissed whenever he sees her and retreats back to the safety of our bedroom, where we kept him (with the door closed) for the first few days we had him.
I do think he feels comfortable at least in the bedroom, even with the door open now, but he is hesitant to explore the living room because he is afraid that our original cat, River, will attack him.
The thing is that River has been nothing but an angel about this whole thing. She has literally sat in the same place multiple times while he explores and he will walk right by her, within 8 inches or so, and then when he notices her he runs away. When he's in the bedroom, I'll be in there petting him and she will just come to the door and sit there watching. When she approaches him and he hissed, she stops and just sort of cries a bit before retreating to a more safe distance.
Through all of this, Bane is still willing to explore a bit and he hasn't been hiding as much. I've been able to get them to accept closer distances to one another through treats, but he still hisses sometimes at her or just avoids her. I feel like we are close to at least reaching the point where they might be indifferent or unthreatened by each other, but I'm just looking for some advice on how to get them to finally be friendly... or more realistically at least tolerant.
I love both of these cats so much and it would break my heart if we can't get them live with each other.
Thank you!
Submitted September 12, 2018 at 12:54AM by OutsideTheServiceBox
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/cat/comments/9f5fob/looking_for_advice_on_integrating_two_cats/?utm_source=ifttt
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