Expert: Ali - 8/7/2011

Question
Hi Ali,
I recently move in to fiance's home that already has 2 male cats & brought over my 2 male cats. Our cats range from 1 yr to 13 yrs old (human yrs). Their names are Lucky(youngest), Blessing(2nd youngest), Angel(2nd oldest), Jazz(oldest). Lucky & Blessing are my fiance's cats & obviously the others are my mines. In my fiance's home blessing has always been the king & in my old home Jazz was the king over there. When the intial introduction began things seem ok, my cats were obviously scare & shy. Blessing & Lucky was very curious & I guess from what we can tell they were trying to be friendly but of course the hissing came from both parties after a long stare down.  I stupidly did not use the proper introduction teachniques in the biginning due to not exploring any further research but did follow some guide lines such as separation of the 4 cats, along with feeding them in separate rooms with their litter boxes. As couples of weeks went by the separtion continue & along with some stalking from blessing. Sometimes Blessing will lay in front of the door awaiting for them. Lucky & Angel seems to in the background awaiting to see what the outcome would be.  We have attempted some more introduction as far as them being in the same room but agian it went from staring, hissing & as of recently a major fight broke between Blessing & Jazz. Jazz got injured but is doing ok.  I have read numerous of articles about cat introdcution but have not seen any thing regarding the post intruction with 4 cats. However from the articles that seem to give good advise I am going to try using a towel to rub one's scent onto anothers. I also read to sprinkle baby powder on the cats as well. I desperately need your help thanks a million....

Answer
Jorge,

I would not recommend sprinkling baby powder on the cats - it's not good for their respiratory systems! You can try Bach flower remedies, something like Rescue Remedy might help to calm everyone down significantly. I recommend administering Rescue Remedy by gently rubbing a few drops into the outside of each of your cats' ear flaps (make sure there aren't any open wounds as the flower essences are preserved in grain alcohol and that would certainly sting!). If your move is relatively recent you can separate the cats by family group into separate rooms and rotate their litterboxes so that everyone gets a chance to use each family group's litter pan for a day or two at a time - this will provide the cats with extensive information about each other. Switching out bedding works on the same principal. Keeping these guys separated for at least 2 weeks while administering Rescue Remedy a couple of times daily and gradually introducing each group's scent to the other should settle things down significantly. It's not a bad idea to also consider investing in cans of compressed air and spray bottles that you can fill with water and set to stream for when you do the face to face introductions again in a couple of weeks just in case things start to get out of hand... It's normal for them to be hissing at each other, even some growling, swatting and hard stares are normal but if anyone is bleeding things have gotten out of hand! NEVER attempt to separate fighting cats with your bare hands, it's a much better idea to toss a glass of water on them to separate them and then have a heavy towel on hand to toss over the cat so that you can safely grab them and remove them from the situation without risking injury to yourselves - bear in mind when cats are highly agitated they won't recognize that their human guardians are trying to settle them down, they may bite or scratch you simply because they're already in a heightened state (in other words, if this happens it's nothing personal).

Introducing two groups of cats to each other will take time, patience, love, understanding, and more patience so take your time and realize that it may take several attempts to get everyone on 'speaking' terms and there may be a few minor skirmishes where lines are drawn in the sand so to speak... Just make sure you have multiple food/water stations set up in different corners of the house and make sure that you have a minimum of one litter box per cat plus one per level of your home (and spread them around, just keep them away from food/water dishes or you're asking for trouble - after all we don't want to eat near where we go to the toilet and neither do cats so you may find some nasty out of the box surprises if you keep food and litter too close together). Distributing litter pans throughout your home in different areas will prevent one or more dominant cats from guarding them and preventing submissive cats from using them which would force the submissive kitties to go outside of the box. Ideally you want to anticipate potential problems such as house soiling and food/resource guarding and prevent them whenever possible in this situation so be sure that everyone gets their fair share of TLC from both 'mom' and 'dad', make sure there are more than enough cozy places to sleep and areas where submissive cats can hide from dominant cats or get out of the way of a 'discussion' between two dominant cats. Blending families, whether human or feline is a labor of love, trust me when I say that the cats may never all be best buddies, but it will get to a point where they will settle down and at least be relatively civil towards one another within a relatively short period of time provided you don't panic when disputes break out or show favoritism towards any of the cats - nothing will create a bigger problem than jealousy over how treats, human attention, food and other important resources are distributed.

If you have any further cat related questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact me again - I'm more than happy to help you in any way that I can!

Kind regards,

Ali