I also posted this on r/cats. I would love some advice.
I have a cat who I adore very much, but for the last five years (his whole life), I’ve given in to every thing he ever wanted. He wakes me up at 4 am just to watch me pour food on top of his already heaping bowl, he attacks me when he sees that I’m getting ready to leave for work, tears up my furniture when I’m going to sleep, etc. He has a lot of energy also and it seems like no amount of play satisfies him. I’ve kind of let all this slide but it was just the two of us living together so it really only effected me.
Now my boyfriend and I are moving in together. He has two cats already who are used to automatic timed feeders and are generally well-behaved. There’s the occasional morning that they may wake him up but it’s rare. We’ve signed a lease and are moving to a new, much larger apartment, in like 2 months. For now, my cat and I have been traveling to his very tiny apartment and staying for weeks at a time.
I have a few issues. My cat gets along ok with his boy cat. They wrestle and my cat loves it. The girl cat wants nothing to do with my cat and hisses at him literally every time he’s even looking her direction. This has led to some undesirably behavior because he will treat it like a game and chase her down.
The other issue is the feeding. We’ve got him on this schedule where he’s being fed automatically 4 times a day. Granted, it’s only been 2 days since he got his feeder, but what he does is plucks at the furniture and tries to wake us up because he still associates me with food and hates having an empty food bowl.
The last issue is that he hates my boyfriend. Like he won’t hide from him, but my cat will bite him and flatten his ears any time my boyfriend tries to pet him. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that, up until recently, my boyfriend was the one who would wake up in the middle of the night and yell at him or spray him with a spray bottle for plucking at the furniture.
I’ve done some research on ways we can improve his behavior. I went out and got a nice big cat tree yesterday, so now they have places to hide and get away from the other cats if they want, I got scratch posts, treats, and a laser pointer because my cat goes ape shit for laser pointers.
I found that yelling and spraying with water aren’t very effective when correcting behavior because the cats don’t associate it with the behavior, just the person spraying them. So my thought is to just ignore him when he’s doing something to get my attention. If he’s plucking at the furniture I can just redirect him to the scratch post and give him a treat for doing it correctly. But I’m not sure what to do about the bedroom.
I’m typing this up literally at 6:30 on a Saturday after he, again, woke me up plucking at the furniture because he wants more food. I try to ignore it and the cat will then get right in my face and just start meowing. I didn’t want him to keep waking my boyfriend up so I just got up so the fact that I’m ignoring him could be more obvious. Also I don’t want to associate him jumping on me with a punishment because obviously I love my cat and want attention from him.
Has anyone had to deal with a transition like this? Is there anything I’m doing wrong or missing? It’s been pretty trial and error and I know this isn’t going to change overnight. It’s just such a delicate balance of not giving him what he wants but also not scaring him away from us.
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/eqgim8/cat_behavior_question_also_posted_on_rcats/
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