Please Give Me Any Advice! Cat Introductions...

[MeganMoon]

Hello everyone! It's me again. We've been making steady progress, today is 3 weeks exactly of work, but I'm finding I still need help.

Brief synopsis. I have a 9 year old lady cat (Chloe) and an 11 week old female kitten (Sasha). From my last post, it sounded like we needed to slow down our steps for introduction by a lot, so we backtracked and went back to feeding through the door only. Sasha spent a little more time in her room, I spent more time in there, and we swapped sites frequently.

Progress! The two of them are eating on either side of the door without much trouble at all. Chloe doesn't hiss at the door all the time anymore, and honestly she has stopped hissing on site -- as long as one of us is holding Sasha. As soon as we (still holding her) put her feet on the ground, Chloe gets hissy again. I sat down with Sasha on the opposite side of my mom's king sized bed while Chloe was sitting there and she had a hissy fit -- but I didn't move because Chloe needs to learn to share territory, right?

We had a bit of an incident this morning. Sasha was out for a run about and Chloe was blocked off on the third floor landing, just watching. Very calm, no issues watching Sasha run around. However, I followed Sasha downstairs to the first floor because I hadn't blocked off the unfinished basement & I didn't want her down there... and Chloe followed me. They came face to face, Chloe made a high pitched angry sound, and Sasha froze. For 0.03 seconds. And then she gave chase. Three times. She has no fear, I swear, and she wants to play with Chloe really badly. Chloe went running up the stairs, Sasha followed, and I went after them both trying to catch Sasha. Obviously they both move faster than me, but this encounter somehow ended with Chloe under my mom's bed, and Sasha under mine. Neither had a mark on them, but they both took some coaxing to come out. We are trimming nails this afternoon in case this kind of encounter happens again.

My question is... is this a bad thing? At this point, are we being too diligent keeping them separated? Chloe doesn't seem to have an issue with Sasha's scent anymore. We brought Sasha's carrier down to the living room so Chloe could poke around in it for a while (we tried letting Chloe come sniff her while she was in the carrier and giving her treats to help her approach but she was very much NOT into this process at all) and as soon as we set it down she shoved her whole body in the thing.

Even after the whole ordeal this morning, after I closed Sasha in her room with some food again Chloe was (according to my dad) calmly and quietly 'guarding' the door. Just sitting right outside.

Help me, you guys... what do we do now?

 

[Furballsmom]

Hi - just my opinion, but I don't think this was a bad thing particularly with Chloe being SO interested in the carrier, unless that was just Chloe trying to overcome Sasha's scent with her own but I don't think that's the case, actually.
You all are doing fine, --just stress about it less since both cats are picking up on your emotions. These two are working things out in cat language, and keep in mind their rules are a whole lot different than ours.
My thinking is be calm, patient and keep doing the things you're doing.

 

[MeganMoon]

Alright, thank you! I'm glad to hear this sounds like it's progressing okay. I haven't got any experience with introducing cats and my friends all have had multi-cat households from day one so it seems like they can just throw any cat into the mix and be completely fine. My friend's mother had 4 cats and recently just dropped a 5th into the mix COMPLETELY unsupervised & they're already getting along better than my two. My old gal is definitely not that personality, so it's hard to figure out what is working and what isn't. It throws me off hearing her be so vocal and angry, I haven't heard her hiss in the 9 years I've had her until now!

 

[danteshuman]

How old is your kitten? Older cats tend to be more accepting of young kittens ... though they do bop them on the head

 

[MeganMoon]

How old is your kitten? Older cats tend to be more accepting of young kittens ... though they do bop them on the head

She's only 11 weeks!! We got her at 8 weeks, we've been doing our slow intro for 3 weeks today.

 

[danteshuman]

Great! She is big enough & yet small enough to be given leeway (the same way we give small children leeway.) So the older cat growling/hissing/batting or bopping the kitten without claws is all about the older cat teaching the kitten to behave. Let your older cat do this. It will help keep the pecking order & pave the way for being buddies when they get older. Some cats just don't love kittens but like them when they become teenagers (provided they respect the older cat's authority.) Our older cat Quasi hated the kittens and constantly bopped Sarah on the head. When she hit around 4 months we noticed he was teaching her but still bopping her (we called him the Godfather because of this.) When she hit 6 months they became friends by time she was 1 year old they were best buds. Though Quasi remained the Top Cat until his death, and then she became Top Cat.

Personally I would see how they do with supervised time. Also your older cat would probably appreciate time away from the hyper annoying kitten when you are sleeping or at work.

 

[MeganMoon]

That's a really good way to phrase it, thank you for that! I'm just nervous that someone is going to get hurt if we don't intervene, so we've been really heavy on the separation. Do you think it would be a good idea to let them give chase sometimes? They're just so much faster than me, so when someone gives chase and gets cornered I'm worried about someone lashing out before I can stop them. I don't know if the claws would come out yet, we haven't had them quite close enough to even see. Chloe ALWAYS runs, and Sasha has no sense of self-preservation and takes off after her every time.

 

[danteshuman]

Chase is a common cat game. So no blood/flying fur/ yowling or cries of genuine pain ... then they are playing.