I have 4 cats in my house that are indoor only cats. I have a 16+ year old feline AIDS kitty, Moon-Pie who I rescued over 8 years ago, he's nuetered. I have a 7 year old female cat who is spayed, Luna. I have a 2 & 3/4 year old female cat who is intact, Scrappy-Doo and I we now have her 3 month old son, Cubby who is scheduled for a nueter. The 2& 3/4 year old female is a registered purebred show cat who will be spayed down the road, but not now. My problem lies in the two females. Both of them get along extremely well with the old man, who just adores everyone anyway. The black female, Luna is a cat that we all joke in the family is our "Invisi-cat" she is never around, was a semi-feral rescue and isn't a loving animal really, unless you are alseep, then she wants to suck on your ear lobes... She is meek and mild. Scrappy is, well she's Scrappy and that's how she got her name. Because the first night we had her she was a tiny little thing and she waltzed right up to my 20 pound Moon-Pie and chewed him a new butt for exsisting, NO FEAR. Scrappy is an amazing cat. I swear she thinks she's a dog. She comes when called no matter where she is. She does cat agaility, etc. She is extremely affectionate and is always out and about in plain sight. Scrappy and Luna have never been buddies but there was never anything outside of the occasional tiff between the two. Until about 8 months ago. Suddenly Scrappy HATES Luna and will go out of her way to go upstairs and attack Luna sleeping under my bed and start a huge fight. It got to the point where Luna started losing weight because she didn't want to go downstairs to eat for fear of being bullied by Scrappy. Luna now has her own food bowl, water bowl, and litter box upstairs so she doesn't have to come down. She still does every few days, but you can tell that she's trying to stay out of range. Luna has started to exhibit anxiety symptoms. Her wool sucking is worse now than it was. She will suck on blankets and you and leave huge puddles of drool. She is grooming herself all the time, to the point where she has hair loss on her back half. I'm at a loss as to what I should do. They are both due at the vet within the next month and have appointments but I just have no experience with one cat bullying another to this point. Most cats may fight here and there but eventually they get over it and deal with the presence of the other. I have been a foster home for shelters, I have bottle raised kittens, etc. I have never seen one cat HATE another like this. The fights, when they happen, are very short, like 30 seconds or less. It's almost like Scrappy just feels the need to put her back in line or to reiterate that she cannot stand her very exsistance. I have no clue what my vet will suggest. I hope it doesn't involve someone having to be put on kitty prozac. I feel bad for Luna. I have considered re-homing Scrappy since Luna has been here the longest and it would be easier to re-home Scrappy than Luna since she's purebred, yonger, etc. Does anyone feel this may be a purely hormonal problem? I am not opposed to spaying Scrappy now if it will fix this. Has anyone dealt with this before? Any advice?
I'm sorry to hear you have this problem. I went through the same thing about 13 years ago. A kitten (well, 6 months to a year when this started) I rescued turned into a raging banchee whenever she saw my half Persian/half Siamese girl. I can't even describe the sound she made when attacking. Coco ended up staying in my bedroom, on top of the plant ledge. She only came down if she absolutely had to. Eventually, it didn't have a happy ending -- Coco ran away. The first time, she was found by a neighbor. The second time...? What made it worse was that a few weeks later Frankie disappeared, though none of the neighbors remembered seeing a calico cat running around, one did remember seeing a coyote wandering up the street one morning around the time she vanished. If Coco had still been home her troubles would have been over. Considering that both cases involve a younger female attacking an older female, my guess is that it's territorial and/or hormonal. I don't remember when I had Frankie spayed, but I believe it was before the attacks began. I don't know what the solution is short of rehoming one of them. Maybe some kitty Prozac for Scrappy?
Sorry, I don't know much about cats. But, my suggestion from my watching TV nearly 75% of a week, I think you shoulder either feed them or keep Luna upstairs and keep scrappy downstairs. Or soemthing. I would just suggest keeping them seperated. I have two dogs, one naturally ours and the other inherited. So obviously things don't always fall into place. They get in fights sometimes, but not often enough for me to give you advice on that. But when our animals do bicker, like one of my dogs and my cat, we seperate them. Sometimes for a short time, sometimes for a long time. Well, good luck with your cats. Ask your vet about an animal physician. I am pretty sure they exist.
I would guess that it is probably hormonal, since if I read right (I'm so tired, sorry) you have one intact male and two unspayed females? (ETA: one unspayed female, sorry!) And both the females got along up until a few months ago, right? Maybe something changed hormonally with the intact male, and now the two females need to establish (over and over apparently) who is top girl and who will get the intact boy kitty. In my experience with cats, they are always more calm and docile once spayed/neutered. We have four cats right now, two males and two females. Our females used to fight a lot when the younger one hadn't yet been spayed. (Though their spats didn't involve all of the stress yours seem to be suffering from!) When she caught us off guard and went into heat my entire cat household went insane even though everyone else was fixed! We ended up having to put the kitten in heat outside in our unattached garage in a large crate while we waited a few days for her surgery, everything was so crazy in here that we couldn't stand it. The day she got spayed, everything went back to calm! The girls still don't love each other, but they can eat next to each other now.
I went through this with my cats. P-kitty is about 3 years old, neutered male, who is very shy. He's our under-the-bed kitty. When we got Katie Cat, they got along fairly well, played together but weren't best buddies. Elise loves P-kitty and tolerates Katie. Well, something happened between P-kitty and Katie. He would run at the sight of her, wouldn't go downstairs to eat, lost weight, had litter box issues; eveyrthing you describe. When we went on vacation we made a consious decision to board Katie. She did fine in boarding. P-kitty re-established the home as his territory and she re-entered as a familiar newcomer. It worked, and we haven't had a problem again. P-kitty is still shy, but that's who he is. Katie and P play together, sleep on the bed with us and eat together. So, maybe board the girlie for a week or two, then reintroduce her. It puts her in lower rank in the cat social order.
Some good suggestions. At the same time, the first thing to do when a cat shows an unexplained significant change in behavior like this would be to take it to the vet for an exam and bloodwork. (In this case, I'd suggest *both* parties go, as indeed it sounds like they will). Sudden movement up or down the cat 'pecking order' is sometimes your only early warning of a health problem. Not in *every* case of course but you'd want to be sure. Good luck, Pat
