Bringing a new cat into your house can be a tricky situation.  You need to take care to make sure fights are kept to a minimum, and kitty friendships (maybe even romances!) are formed.

The first thing to remember is that the cats are in charge.  Let them determine the pace of friendship building.

Then you should consider the personality of the cats involved.

You know your cats, and should be able to make a reasonable guess at the personality of the new cat.  So if either cat is shy or takes longer to make friends, take things at a more gentle pace.

If they are both the sort that looks for a crowd to join in, can start a conversation with anybody, and has a bright extroverted personality, then why not let them get on with it?

The other thing to consider is space.  No matter what the personality, if you force them into the same small space which at least one cat believes is theirs and theirs alone, there will be trouble.  If they are outdoor cats and can disappear for a bit of “me time” there is less potential for bother.

So let’s say you have a shy cat at home called Salt, and you have found a gorgeous-but-very-suspicious-of-other-cats moggy at the local shelter called Pepper.  Both cats are going to be kept indoors.  How should you handle this?

Step 1

Put Pepper in a room that Salt doesn’t use, and keep him in there whenever Salt is running about the house.

Step 2

Whenever Salt is in a room he can’t get out of (or is outside), open the door of Pepper’s room and let him wander out and explore if he wants.

Step 3

Continue with this until Pepper is comfortable in another room in the house.  Make sure he can’t get out of it and let Salt into his room.  This will introduce their scents to each other.  If this causes upset to Pepper, go back to step 2 until she is happy again.

Step 4

Repeat step 3 until Pepper doesn’t mind the scent of Salt in his room.

Step 5

Find a way of letting them see each other in the flesh with minimal physical contact e.g. through a gap in sliding doors, using a door stop in an ordinary door, or some other method you can come up with.

Step 6

Open that door!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.