I'm at my wit's end
My partner and I have two cats: a 5 year old we've had since he was a kitten, and a ~1 year old we've had for about three months. Both male.
The older cat (Prince) has always been a loner. He likes his space, and he's not shy about letting you know when he wants to be left alone. We brought in the younger cat (Leo) because he wasn't getting a lot of attention where he was before, and just overall didn't have a great quality of life. But, maybe because of that, Leo seems to have no sense of boundaries. At all. He's not aggressive towards Prince, and they do occasionally play together or just sit by the window together, but more often than not Leo wants to play when Prince doesn't, and nothing Prince does gets the message across. Prince will walk away, or growl/hiss, or even swat at Leo if Leo won't leave him alone--Leo just goes back for more.
We have tried tiring him out, but it works for an hour or two. He stops to recharge, and then he's back to bothering Prince. We've tried positive reinforcement, moving him away when he's being annoying and giving him treats/other toys to play with. He either gets bored within minutes, or we set him down and he immediately goes back to bothering Prince. And I know spray bottles aren't great for disciplining cats, but we've even tried spraying or at least threatening to spray him. He sees the bottle, trots off, and a minute later he's...you guessed it, back to bothering Prince. Putting one of them in another room for a while doesn't work. Catnip doesn't work, Feliway doesn't work. Nothing works. He doesn't learn.
We understand Leo is a baby, but Prince is getting more and more stressed out and it doesn't seem fair to either one of them. It hasn't gotten better in the time we've had Leo, it's honestly gotten worse, and we have no idea why or what to do. Does anyone have any suggestions? We don't want to rehome Leo, but we will if nothing else can be done.
[link] [comments]
from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/bzl5do/trying_to_figure_out_our_new_kitten_vs_our_older/
No comments:
Post a Comment