Hey everybody, I need some help with my current pet situation as it has caused a considerable amount of stress for me and my family.
So last Saturday, we adopted a dog from a shelter. She's a sweet little Manchester Terrier mix and we instantly clicked with her. We had been planning on getting a dog for a decent amount of time and knew what we were looking for, so it as an easy pick. She'd been lovely so far.
However, the issue is that we have a cat. Our cat is around 6 years old and was once a street cat; she had been taken to a shelter to find her a home. We adopted her and she became accustomed to life as an indoor cat, with no signs of any issues. She was a bit slow to adapt, but that was expected. Anyway, we've had her for the past 5 years as our sole pet and there were no major issues for us.
We knew about the precautions we needed to take to introduce a cat and a dog. The shelter had told us that the dog had no issues with cats and that, in fact, she preferred to be left alone. This sounded like a godsend for us, as we believed that the dog would be actively seeking the cat out and she would be the one we had to train. However, the opposite was true. We situated the dog into a sanctuary room, a separate room where the cat had no access to. This seemed to cause great stress in my cat, and later that day she attacked me after I had recently come out of the dog's sanctuary room. I didn't think too much of it, as I had believed it was a form of redirected aggression from the cat. The smells and sounds were new so she was probably anxious.
Thinks appeared better for the next day as we kept the dog and cat separate. We distract the cat whenever the dog is taken out for a walk by playing with her or giving her food. We do this to encourage the cat to be more calm despite everything going on around her, although I'm not sure it has the desired effect. Regardless, the second day was not bad whatsoever in relation to these two. The only real sign is that the cat, whenever she is not sleeping, is constantly camping by the doorway of the sanctuary room.
On the third day, I am in the sanctuary room with the dog when she sits down near the door. All of a sudden, the cat attacks the other side of the door and makes this horrid, deep sound and I could only assume that she is not happy. This scared the shit out of my dog who ran to me, whimpering and crying because the cat made it pretty clear that she did not like the dog. This happened once that day, but I began to fear that whenever I opened the door to enter and leave the sanctuary room, the cat would slip in and hurt my dog. I also feared that the dog would run out of the room in excitement, only to be pounced upon by my cat.
The incident with the door has occurred a few more times since then, and we have no idea how to handle the current situation. We left them apart for a few days and tried doing the scent swapping thing, but the cat does not seem interested in the scent of the dog. Recently, we tried out the closed door feeding idea, where you feed the dog and cat on opposite sides of the same door to get them comfortable around each other. However, the cat had no interest in eating anywhere near the sanctuary room, and even refused to eat for the next half an hour when I returned the bowl to its original position.
We are truly at a loss for what to do, and we're fearing that it might be best for our cat to be rehomed to a household where she is the only pet. Is there anything I can try to prevent this? Or should we come to terms with the fact that our cat is not meant to be in a multiple pet household?
TL;DR: We got a new dog and the cat really doesn't like her, regardless of what we do. How do we fix this?
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/cu5vi0/i_need_help_with_an_unstable_pet_situation/
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