Introducing a New Cat or Kitten to Your Resident Cat

Most cat owners who decide to add another cat or kitten to their homes do not stop to consider the gravity of their ambitions. They assume that all they have to do is call a meeting, take the new cat out of its carrier, present it to the old cat and say, "Princess, this is Sweetums. He's going to be playing with your toys, using your litter pan, drinking from your water bowl and sharing the bed with us. Isn't he cute?"

At which point Princess is thinking "Right. He's about as cute as a dried-up hairball. If that sucker tries to sleep in my bed, I'll close his eyes for good."

Introducing one cat to another, while not as difficult as negotiating a peace settlement, does require some forethought. The following advice should help to smooth the introductory process.

Forewarned Is For Sure

The time to start planning for the new arrival, which Princess will no doubt consider a horrible unwelcome guest, is before you find a poor shadow of a kitten hunched beneath your car in the garage. Before some poor cat starts hanging around the back door begging a meal. Before you pass a pet store and decide you have to have one of those kittens in the window. In short, the time to get ready is now.

We Hold These Truths

We begin with the following assumptions: Your present cat is altered. Your present cat spends all of its time indoors. You own a carrier in which you transport your cat to the vet every time it sneezes. You have a spare litter pan. Your cat has current vaccinations. If you cannot say yes to these assumptions, you should not say yes when a new cat or kitten crooks its finger at you beckoningly.

Timing is Everything

Before you bring a new cat or kitten home, you should prepare a room where it will spend some time in quarantine. Do not choose your cat’s favorite sanctuary or resting-place for this function. The idea is to fit the newcomer into your cat’s routine, not to make your cat feel dethroned.

The solitary-confinement approach is recommended for several reasons. First, no one should introduce a newcomer without first isolating it for a while, no matter what the feleuk test said. Second, a quarantine period allows the newcomer to adjust to its new surroundings before your cat meets him, learn the whereabouts of the litter box, and so on.

Until you are satisfied that the newcomer is not harboring any contagions that did not show up at the vet inspection - that is, for ten days to two weeks – he should have no direct and prolonged contact with your cat. For the first few days they can exchange sniffs and resumes from either side of closed door.

Opening Salvos

When you feel the time is right - and after you have clipped everyone's claws - put the newcomer into the cat carrier (with the carrier door latched), open the door to its room, and allow your cat to come in and conduct a prescreening interview of fifteen or twenty minutes. Be sure to take up the water bowl, food dish and litter pan first to help prevent transmission of any possible disease.

Brief, repeated visits like this help to foster the development of social-greeting behavior. More than any other kind of interaction they enable cats to share accommodations peacefully.

Do not be discomfited by hissing, growling, back arching, or big-tail displays from one or both cats at first. And do not fret if your cat goes off his food or off to the farthest reaches of the house to sulk.

Wheels Off

After no more than two weeks you should be ready to take away the training wheels and allow your cat and the newcomer to try unfettered, but not unsupervised, contact. Bring your cat into the isolation ward for a visit, but this time do not confine the newcomer beforehand. Put your cat on the floor, retire to a neutral corner, and have a large towel, a broom, and a high-velocity squirt gun handy just in case. All should go well, but if the rare life-threatening fight erupts, separate the combatants, wrap one in the towel and return him to his accustomed place. Reinstate the brief visitations in a day or so and then attempt the free-range introduction several days after that. And do not expect miracles.

It may well be that you can only hope for a slightly distant but tolerant relationship between the two cats, not a loving, curl-up-by-the-fire-in-a-heap one. An armed truce, however, is better than armed combat.

The Bottom Lines

If your cat and the newcomer manage to occupy the same room on three of four successive days without trying to give one another a buzz cut, you can leave the room with confidence, but do not leave the house. You want to be around if peace does not prove permanent. (You can help to ensure that peace is permanent by providing each cat with its own food dish, scratching post and litter pan. Cats, like most perpetual youngsters, do not like to share.)

Finally, you should put yourself in your cat's place. How would you feel if your spouse, roommate or whatever brought someone home one day without consulting you, then announced that that individual was going to be living in your house? An announcement of that kind in the human world is often followed by a visit from the SWAT team - even if the newcomer arrives with a negative AIDS test. Why should a cat's reaction be any different?

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MEOW Cat Rescue Organization
10600 NE 68th, Suite F, Kirkland, WA 98033 | (p) 425.822.6369
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