We adopted a two month old kitten a few months ago, he is now 8 months old. I’ve raised several kittens over the years, but don’t ever remember having this much trouble with any of them. It’s frazzling my husband and I, we really don’t want to give the cat up. I’m also not sure how much of his behavior is “normal”.
We have an older female cat (~8 years) who is a sweetheart. When we adopted this kitten we were careful to introduce them slowly, at first they seemed fine together and the older one just ignored him unless they were playing (hiding around corners, batting, no hissing). Younger one has a ton of energy, we got him a bunch of toys and made it a point to play with him as much as we can and have electric toys too. My husband works from home and spends a lot of time giving him attention.
Slowly he just started getting more and more aggressive with the older cat, she frequently draws boundaries with hissing, growling, and swinging. He just goes after her for no reason, especially when she’s relaxing somewhere or getting attention from us. I’ve never seen her this stressed and reserved in the years I’ve had her.
Kitten also gets aggressive towards me, he’s scratched me deeply multiple times, for example he doesn’t jump into my lap, he carves into me (hard to explain). He doesn’t hiss or swing at me though. He doesn’t hurt my husband.
He’s also been pooping in the bathtub, he has two litter boxes in addition to the older cat’s one, he uses them all. If I catch him doing it he seems playful and excited that I’ve caught him. We can’t keep him off of counters, he’ll knock plants and dishes off. He’s been scratching all our furniture and clothes, especially our bed. We’ve been covering a lot of it with foil which the cat hates.
He also won’t let us sleep, he’ll have nights where we have to put him in the basement because he won’t stop freaking out and yowling. He’ll attack me in the night, scratching my feet. He’ll knock things over in our room to wake us up. When we try to give him attention he’ll run away and meow loudly in another room. We live in a decently sized home, so I don’t think he has a reason to be territorial. We got him neutered at five months on advice from our vet because of the aggression.
We’ve tried a bunch of different interventions, but we are honestly exhausted. I don’t know if this is normal or not, but I’ve never had a cat with this many issues. I would love to hear suggestions or stories from others with similar issues. Thank you!
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/d9sffs/8_month_cat_with_escalating_behavioral_issues/
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