Thank you. It will be two weeks tomorrow. This site and a response I got from a specialist’s assistant helped a lot. I really appreciate it all. We are resetting. We did eating on opposite sides of the door and when that went well we put up a screen door. Our mistake it seems is leaving that open so they could see each other 24/7. There were unsupervised spats. Going back to closed door and then trying limited supervised screen time.
Thank you for responding. It was fairly short (2 more weeks) but we compromised and now we are giving them the time they need for each step. If it doesn’t progress at all with following the strict instructions we know they just won’t fit. It’s kitten season and we live in a college town where sadly pets are dumped at the end of the semester so we need to give her the chance she deserves. She’s sweet and both cats are using their litter boxes and eating and drinking normally so we aren’t as bad as we felt earlier this week. Resident is also back to zooming around :-)
This is huge, good for you!!
This is a truly major thing.
and this is wonderful to hear!!
I totally agree with you
Thank you so much! My parents had adopted a male when we had a resident female so from that and reading personality matches are more important than gender matches, I thought it could work. I appreciate you sharing as it helps reinforce this. They are very similar in energy and personality.So good to hear that the cats are making progress. Any progress is good, even if its slow! I also introduced my adopted female cat to my resident male cat. I researched all the steps of cat introductions and was willing to take it slow. I told my partner about the steps but he thought it would be fine to just let them have access to each other after just a couple of days. I think the excitement got to both and we rushed it (thats why its good that everyone in your household is now on the same page). Like you, as soon as we did that the cats started having little spatz. We had to do the reintroduction process three times with our cats and eventually we felt comfortable enough letting them have access to each other but things still weren't perfect. Its been about three months since bringing our 2nd cat into our home. Things have improved greatly but the progress has happened very slowly. They rarely get into any spatz now and will actually go up to each other and start sniffing. Sometimes cats never become ‘great friends’ but as long as they are able to safety be around each other, thats all we can wish for. Some cats personalities just mesh better than others but I'm sure you'll get there. A little clawing, growling, and hissing is bound to happen but it should hopefully keep happening less and less, just always make sure there are never any injuries. It may take several months but they should acclimate with time!
