We are pleased to announce that we have a new cat!
In mid July, I featured a cat (Ely) who had been found living in a feral colony. He was trapped and neutered and had his ear tipped before anyone realized that he wasn’t feral at all. Rick and I went to meet him and offered to foster this extremely friendly young cat. We thought that Mickey Mouser needed some feline companionship…
Mickey Mouser, “What? You mean he’s staying???”
After a few weeks of quarantine for coccidia, we started introducing Mickey and Rufus. There was a whole lot of hissing going on, all of it generated by Mickey. We knew that Rufus has a non-dominant laid-back personality and, now almost three weeks later, we are starting to feel that this is going to work out fine.
Rufus has been very helpful in my studio reorganizing my files.
Although, the cat alphabet might be different than the one we use.
The most helpful advise I found online was to stay calm and speak to the cats in a light loving tone of voice, even when you see trouble brewing. Yelling to stop an incident only feeds the potential aggression. Many times the cats had face offs with twitching tails. We were able to defuse the situation using this technique.
Putting bells on both cats’ collars also seemed to help. They weren’t able to sneak up on, or startle each other.
Do you have any tips for introducing a new cat?