cats got along beautifully, now one is bushy and chasing the other.

[SpaceDuck]

hi guys! so i have two cats that main my house as they are my own, both girls, both under a year old. for the past few months i've had to watch my friends cat as well while he's on deployment, however, up until now they just played and got along. they slept together, snuggled, bathed together. now suddenly my oldest girl, is chasing around my friends cat super sketched out and bushy. i've looked up and down for injuries, there's none., he seems fine ( has not an aggressive cat hes very calm but slinks around cause hes a little skittish). i've had to seperate my oldest girl from the other two right now, she doesnt attack her sister, only my friends cat. i'm not sure what to do? temporary rehoming is not an option.

 

[ArtNJ]

Sometimes things can go wrong in a cat relationship and you need to give them a little break with a separation of hours, or if needed, days to reset things. In extreme cases, you might need to actually do a sort of formal reintroduction process over a week or more.

It doesn't sound especially serious if you didn't have aweful noises and actual fighting with rolling around with hostile intentions, so hopefully a short separation should do the trick.

One can't always know what started it, but common triggers for problems including coming back from the vet or groomer, or something stressful happening when they were close to each other (sometimes seeing an outside cat). If its a coming back from the vet issue, thats because the cat comes back smelling a bit different, so there are some additional things that can be tried to speed up things, like rubbing the cat that comes back with his favorite blanket to "rescent" the cat.