Advice on introducing new kitten to 2 cat home

[kittymom26]

Hi

I'm new here, and looking for some advice. We currently have 2 kitties in our home - we adopted them from a shelter last year after our long time cat was attacked and killed by a raccoon.

They are mother and son. My female is a torti, spayed. She just turned 2 in September. She is super sweet and just adores us (especially my son) but she's kind of a stalker LOL - follows us around the house, meows/cries loudly if she sees one of her humans leave, and loves to lay in bed with any one of us, cuddling as close as possible. Her favorite thing is to be picked up and held like a baby while she gets kisses on her head. She is very much the alpha cat and demands attention from us a lot.

Our male cat will be 2 in April and is an orange tabby. When we got him, he was still a little kitten who was nursing. Fast forward a year, and he's now a big boy (meaning he's a little chunky and just big...big paws, very long tail) He is very laid back and mellow...a super lazy kitty who really just would prefer to nap more than anything else. He has a very sweet disposition as well...he will come to us for pets and  chin scratches a couple times a day but he is no way near the level of "high maintenance" that his momma is. He is perfectly content just laying in a chair in my office all day...all I have to do is call his name and pet his head a little and he has major purring going on. 

Now, here's the dilemma. We rescued a little kitten who is around 5 months old - he was attacked by either a larger cat or a dog and had a gash on his little face...it was heartbreaking. Nobody knows where this little guy came from - he showed up in our next door neighbor's yard, just wandering around, hungry and meowing. She cannot keep it because her child has allergies and asked if we could somehow help either find it a home or something and there was no way we could say no. One of the things that really tugged at my heartstrings is that this new little kitten is all white - and he looks like a mini version of our other kitty who died last summer. Her death left a huge hole in my heart which is still not healed, to be honest.

Anyway, so we decided to take our new kitten to the vet and get him checked out...so far so good. The kitten was also neutered while he's been at the vet, so when we get him back that will be all taken care of. (We are supposed to get him back in the next day or two...they were trying to get a fecal test done and couldn't get a good enough sample yet). This was all a big financial investment that I wasn't really prepared to make so close to the holidays, but we decided as a family that we HAD to take care of this poor baby. 

We really want to keep this new kitten...but I am very nervous about how to introduce him into our current cat family. So I am hoping that someone can give some suggestions, tips, advice or is willing to share a similar experience of bringing a kitten into a similar home. I've heard lots of advice that females take to kittens easier some times, etc...but I honestly don't know what to expect here.

Can someone share some advice on how we can make this as painless as possible? Thank you in advance!

 

[stephanietx]

Welcome to TCS and congrats on your new kitty!  Here's a great article to get you started.  It's located in the "sticky" at the top of the Behavior forum.

http://www.thecatsite.com/a/introducing-cats-to-cats

Then, here are a bunch of threads related to introducing kitties.  http://www.thecatsite.com/newsearch/?search=introducing&sort=relevance&order=descending&titleonly=0&byuser=&output=all&sdate=0&containingforum[0]=5&replycompare=gt&numupdates=&newer=1&type=all&advanced=1

 

[kittymom26]

Thank you! Checking these out now

 

[kittymom26]

OK so an update. New kitten came home on Friday night. We have been keeping him separate from our other two kitties so far...they have been smelling each other under the door etc. Yesterday we tried leaving the kitten in the carrier and letting the resident cats sniff. My spayed female immediately hissed - she came right over to the kitten. The kitten was unphased. My male orange tabby came close to the carrier but not right up to it...he hissed, then hissed at my female cat), hissed at us, and then ran back to the room where the food/water/litterbox is.

I should mention that my orange male is a HUGE scaredy cat...you can't even open the windows in the house without him running and hiding.

Today we tried an experiment...we kept the male in a different room and tried introducing my female and the kitten. We let the kitten run around and my female was pretty much ignoring him until he came close and then she hissed and growled but did not make any moves to attack or anything. The kitten was pretty much fine - at one point he did hiss and puff out his tail at her, but he quickly stopped and then continued to explore the living room. I didn't want to do too much exposure (and I was a ball of nerves the whole time, actually) so I put the kitten back in the room for now. I'll try some more integration tomorrow. My line of thinking (and from stuff I have read) that sometimes if you get the alpha cat in the home to accept a new cat, getting the other cats to accept is easier. My male orange fellow is very much a "follower" of what my female does (not sure if it's just because that's his momma cat, or because he's just a wimpy boy LOL)

Is the fact that my female did not make any moves to attack the kitten a good sign?

 

[drbobcat]

First, my warmest regard for your feline-amarian gesture.  White cats should never live out doors.  They will burn, freeze, and can contract cancer.  You seem to be doing the right thing.  Best advice I ever saw (on this site I believe) is when you think it's time to "move on", wait two days.  There's no rush.  Share toys, bedding, even used litter between your cats and the kitten.  Feed them on either side of a door.  Cats associate eating with good feelings.  Do more of the carrier trick.  Your resident cats will appreciate the chance to be offended, but not in any danger.  Don't worry about hissing and growling.  They're just expressing an opinion, but don't force the kitten on them.  BTW, sound like a really nice kitten. 

 

[kittymom26]

Well, here's an update. I continued more of the same that I was doing - on the 3rd day after I let my momma cat (the torti) interact with the kitten, my boy tabby started to come closer to the kitten and after a few hours they were hanging out on the couch together. So far he has been very tolerant - he play wrestles with the kitten a lot which at first made me nervous since he weighs about 3 times what the kitten does, but the kitten holds his own very well. They haven't had any real fights as far as I can tell or have seen, and at this point all 3 are spending the majority of the day together. I have still been separating them at night, but I hope to stop doing that soon since I would like my 2nd bathroom back at some point

The kitten is a super sweet boy - very loving towards not just us but the big kitties too. He often approaches us or the other kitties and rubs his head on us. We appreciate it more than the big kitties LOL. t try to play with him as much as I can because he has a lot of energy and the more I stimulate him the less he annoys my big kitties by jumping on them etc to play. Everyone that I have spoken to or has watched the cats in action has said that the wrestling thing is not something to be concerned about - so so far, I haven't been intervening unless I hear a yowl or a louder meow - at that point I clap my hands and they stop, moving on to something else. 

My torti still hisses at him from time to time, but it's mostly when he gets up into her "personal space" - he will try to play with her and she will play back but if he gets too close, she backs off. If he persists, she will growl sometimes too and at that point he leaves her alone. She is hard to read behavior wise at times but as far as I can tell, she is not the new kitten's BFF but she is tolerant of him as long as he doesn't bother her. One thing that made me feel good about continued progress was this: my torti loves to get up in bed with my son (who is 10) and lay on a blanket that's fleece and she does the whole thing of suckling and kneading thing for long periods of time. (I've read that this is a behavior common in cats who were separated from their mother too young and they do it as a comfort thing?)  A few times the kitten has jumped up in bed too and at first I was concerned she might get upset. (I have seen her hiss at my tabby before when he has jumped up) I watched the first couple of times...my son adores all of the kitties so he gave both of them lots of pets and attention to try to "keep the peace" just in case LOL. Surprisingly, they were perfectly OK laying there pretty close to each other on this same blanket without any growling, hissing or anything...eventually both napped there for a while. They have been doing this almost every day when he comes home from school (and during the day now that we are on Xmas break) and so far no issues. So as I said, I think she might not necessarily like him, but she's tolerant of him so that's really all I guess I can hope for for now, right? 

Funny - today the kitten went to the vet for a follow up appointment and was gone for about an hour - my torti walked around the house for a bit, seemingly looking for something...and she did her routine of crying loudly as she does when a human leaves the house. My inner optimist wants to think she might have been looking for the kitten, ha ha.