Jasper, chapter 2

Well, Jasper, the kitten met the grown-up cats yesterday, and wouldn't you know it, Jasper chases Roxy around the house like nobody's business! Roxy is the kitty who's been tormenting Sophie, though they (Roxy & Sophie) seem to have finally reached a truce of some sort.

We didn't really keep them (Jasper with resident kitties) together long yesterday (wonder why?) and we'll try it again kind of soon. I expect Roxy will put him in his place soon, but honestly, except the the kitty-stress it caused, it was really funny to see!

It looks like we're in for an interesting time of it. It turns out that the only cat with the patience to "teach" the little guy manners is Sophie. Roxy runs off every time she sees him. For those of you who have read about our cats before, Sophie is the younger kitty that Roxy picks on. When Sophie gets Jasper to mind his manners, maybe then Roxy can stand to hang around again.

Mostly Jasper is still living upstairs, but we are giving the cats some "practice" time together. When we just put Jasper and Sophie in the room together, they did reasonably well. As long as he has dingle-balls or something appropriate to chase, he doesn't bother her that much. (Sure, Sophie says . . . that's what YOU say!)

I have read the books about sharing scents /rooms /etc, and we're doing that too, but we are learning that cats haven't got the least interest in what the books say . . . Looks like they'll be working on their little problems for a while yet . . .

Kitties ignoring books is pretty much what happened to me - I did all the stuff the books all say to do, scent by scent, room by room, syllable by sylllable - and ended up just letting them mix and mingle and figure it out themselves. For me what really helped was having toys on hand to distract any staring contests, and feeding them near each other, and just telling the resident cat she was number one. But I could have used sedatives myself at first!