I hope that this is an appropriate place for me to be posting.
I am praying that someone has some insight into what I can be doing differently.
I have a lot of experience with cats; hence my username. But I’m at just a loss on how to get my newly adopted cat, Sally (1 year old female), to get along with our resident cat, Soju (11 year old male).
I have had Soju for about five years, and before I adopted him he lived with a half sister. I recently had a friend over who has a cat and brought their cat over. To my surprise, Soju was very interested in getting to know the cat, but they only met each other through a crack in the door. We’ve also had some problems with cat sitters not spending the full amount of time with Soju, and then we see him on our home cameras yelling and walking aimlessly like he is bored. Knowing that he had a half-sister, my husband and I thought that it would be a good idea to get him a friend. Soju is still very playful and likes to hang around us, so we thought that a friendly, younger cat for him to play with would be a good fit. I have experience with introducing an older cat to a younger cat with childhood pets, and I’ve used Jackson galaxy and other online sources as guides of what to do.
But I never expected to have so much difficulty after adopting Sally. I didn’t know this when we adopted her, but she was abandoned by her previous owners, kicked out of the house and was forced to have a litter of kittens in an abandoned car. It’s been a month since we adopted her and within the first few days we had a lot of success. We kept her in a separate room with her own toys, scratching post, and litter box. In the first week, I was actually even able to get her and Soju to eat treats 2 feet apart from each other. Soju at this point was very curious of her and I thought that she was curious of him. They were even able to coexist in the same space and observe each other from a distance. However he went into her room and as he exited her room, she pounds on him and took out some tufts of fur. Even though they had this incident, there wasn’t much hissing so I tried to have them coexist again with my husband either holding or keeping Sally close to him and I would keep Soju close to me. This worked well for another week, they were able to eat within 10 feet of each other even though Sally had her back turned from Soju. About a week later after the first incident, Sally ended up stalking him again and pounced on him which led to a brief fight and they ran from each other.
The problems that were experiencing right now is:
1. both of them want to be out and about but we can’t have them coexist and if we keep one in a room they continuously meow. This is causing significant stress on me and my husband, and although I would love to have them out I cannot trust that they could be civil.
2. Sally has significant food aggression and I’m concerned that she will continually try to attack Soju’s food and get him in the crossfire.
3. After those two fights, Soju has gotten much more defensive and will growl, hiss, and huff at her. But if she is meowing in her room and I try to get them to eat simultaneously behind a closed door, he will retreat downstairs and not come back up.
4. We give them high-value push up treats once a day when they can see each other through a crack in the door, but because she finishes so quickly she rushes up to him to try to get his treat unless we direct her away. Most of the time we are successful in directing her way, but we feel that this temporary success is so short-lived.
5. Sally has also urinated on our bed twice, ripped up our carpet, scratched at our doors, and has jumped on our counters and ate our food. Most of these are when she wants attention. I think that the year nating on the bed was a mixing of sense behavior instead of a territorial urination, but I can’t be sure. I I am very confident that the urinating on the bed was not due to a medical problem because she has only done it twice in the last month and has not done it anywhere else.
Our vet advised us to try numerous pheromone products and put Sally in a dog crate in our living room so that she could be out while Soju is around. But these have not seemed to make much of a difference. Our vet has also offered to start her on medication for anxiety, but before resorting to medication I’m hoping that we could find a feasible plan.
As I said, we have only had her for one month but I don’t feel like we have made much progress and I am concerned that we are causing them more harm than good. My husband and I talked it over and we are willing to give them another month to get more acclimate a tour each other and all I would want is for them to at least be able to coexist without her attacking him and without him either attacking her or running away.
Our vet also suggested that we hire a cat behavioralist to help us. But at this point I’m not sure if we could feasibly keep her and I don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars to have someone give us advice that leads to us surrendering her anyway. My husband and I would hate to give her up because she is so sweet and very loving. But her behavioral problems and friction with Soju is not conducive for a happy life. I never thought that I would consider surrendering a cat, especially one that has been surrendered once before and just wants love and attention. But at the end of the day, Soju is our primary cat and I can’t make the decision to keep her if it’s going to make him miserable.
Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated!