I feel terrible even posting at this point, you guys must be sick of me by now, but I'm caught in the middle of an endless cycle of peacefully coexisting animals, and extremely nasty territorial aggression between those same animals, and not only could I use the support, maybe someone else will learn from my various mistakes and inexperience.
Sophie's territorial aggression towards Jack continues, following a very inconsistent pattern. Let's use the past 24 hours as an example. I tend to stay up all night, so I was just going to bed around 5:30am yesterday. Sophie, as has become her habit at bedtime, spent some time bugging Jack, kicking him out of his resting places by pouncing on him and nipping at him. This time (unlike the previous night/morning, when she was extremely aggressive and nearly unstoppable), I was able to divert her several times, until she settled down to sleep and lost interest. I woke up around noon with Sophie sleeping on the small of my back, Jack curled up on the bed about a foot away, both of them without a care at their close proximity.
They got along fine all day, which is usually the case. After they get their wet food "brunch" when I get up, they mostly sleep all day. Interactive playtime, as always, was totally Jack's thing; he will chase Da Bird until his little mouth hangs open and he pants. Sophie will just sit there and WATCH it until my arm gets tired from holding the wand up (I've tried I don't know how many different interactive toys at this point, and it's always the same). This evening, Sophie even allowed Jack to join her on the bed (in the hotly-contested bedroom, no less) and groom her a bit; awhile later, I found them sleeping *under* the bed, mere inches apart and totally content.
The past two hours or so have been a different story. Sophie has been relentlessly and repeatedly driving Jack from the room, constant nipping and pawing and a few wrestling matches. Once he's out of the room, she lies in the doorway, clearly attempting to warn him off via intimidation (I've been reading "Cat Vs Cat" by Pam Johnson-Bennett, which has clued me in to a few behaviors I wasn't aware of before). This is a new development, because usually she doesn't start this type of behavior until bedtime.
I think my only option at this point is reintroduction, but this brings about a new dilemma. Jack's original "safe room" is my upstairs bathroom. The weather is now very warm, and I don't have central a/c, so I would have to open the window for him. Jack, who oddly, seems to prefer being picked on by Sophie to being left by himself, WILL cry and moan in his Siamese-esque voice if I put him back in there. Since the window faces directly into the neighbors' bedroom (and they are not particularly tolerant or kind people under the best of circumstances), that's likely to result in a visit from the police with a "noise complaint." Really, now that he's recovered from his URI, it's simply too small a space for such a hugely-energetic cat anyway.
I'll have the second upstairs bedroom cleared out within the week - I'm also looking into options for fully enclosing the second floor so that it's like an "apartment" all to itself, which will give me both large bedrooms, a hall, and a bathroom, easily the size of a small apartment, and I won't have to worry about confining them both in the same room while I sleep. But in the meantime, I can't let her continue to harass him.
So, I never thought it would come to this, particularly after they seemed to get off to such a great start - but I will have to segregate SOPHIE for the night. It falls in line with some things suggested by Pam Johnson-Bennett in her book (about limiting the space of an aggressor cat instead of the newcomer/"victim"), and I don't know, she might even be happy to be in a Jack-Free Zone for the night. But it breaks my heart for it to have come to this. And since I don't have adequate space for a full reintroduction yet, it's the best I can come up with - my other two options are (1) get fined for a noise violation, or (2) let Sophie continue to attack Jack when I lie down to sleep.
I brought Jack into our lives in good faith, for Sophie's sake, in the first place. After a seemingly great start, their relationship has gone steadily downhill, and it kills me. They still seem so well-matched; Jack keeps Sophie up and moving and active during their waking hours, and he's a very patient, well-intentioned little guy who still keeps trying to make friends, even when she's being very nasty to him. But I hadn't anticipated such a heated territorial dispute, and I should have. I should never have assumed that I could bring a new animal into a small space that has been 100% Sophie's for her entire life. However well-intentioned my decision to adopt Jack may have been, I truly was not prepared for this.
My family and I have adopted animals my entire life, and while we have never, and would never, rehome an animal once we made the commitment to care for it, this is a conflict on a much larger scale than we've ever experienced, and it's very disheartening. We'll get through it; after all, they do have their good moments, even some very sweet moments. That tells me that they're not just two cats that will never get along, but they need the proper space in which to live peacefully, and I haven't been giving that to them. It will take me time to correct this, though, and I fear for the setbacks that might occur in the meantime.
Sorry for the wall of text...I think I'm writing this as much for myself as anything else. Just feeling down, and like a very "bad cat mom", at the moment, and I guess I needed to vent.
Sophie's territorial aggression towards Jack continues, following a very inconsistent pattern. Let's use the past 24 hours as an example. I tend to stay up all night, so I was just going to bed around 5:30am yesterday. Sophie, as has become her habit at bedtime, spent some time bugging Jack, kicking him out of his resting places by pouncing on him and nipping at him. This time (unlike the previous night/morning, when she was extremely aggressive and nearly unstoppable), I was able to divert her several times, until she settled down to sleep and lost interest. I woke up around noon with Sophie sleeping on the small of my back, Jack curled up on the bed about a foot away, both of them without a care at their close proximity.
They got along fine all day, which is usually the case. After they get their wet food "brunch" when I get up, they mostly sleep all day. Interactive playtime, as always, was totally Jack's thing; he will chase Da Bird until his little mouth hangs open and he pants. Sophie will just sit there and WATCH it until my arm gets tired from holding the wand up (I've tried I don't know how many different interactive toys at this point, and it's always the same). This evening, Sophie even allowed Jack to join her on the bed (in the hotly-contested bedroom, no less) and groom her a bit; awhile later, I found them sleeping *under* the bed, mere inches apart and totally content.
The past two hours or so have been a different story. Sophie has been relentlessly and repeatedly driving Jack from the room, constant nipping and pawing and a few wrestling matches. Once he's out of the room, she lies in the doorway, clearly attempting to warn him off via intimidation (I've been reading "Cat Vs Cat" by Pam Johnson-Bennett, which has clued me in to a few behaviors I wasn't aware of before). This is a new development, because usually she doesn't start this type of behavior until bedtime.
I think my only option at this point is reintroduction, but this brings about a new dilemma. Jack's original "safe room" is my upstairs bathroom. The weather is now very warm, and I don't have central a/c, so I would have to open the window for him. Jack, who oddly, seems to prefer being picked on by Sophie to being left by himself, WILL cry and moan in his Siamese-esque voice if I put him back in there. Since the window faces directly into the neighbors' bedroom (and they are not particularly tolerant or kind people under the best of circumstances), that's likely to result in a visit from the police with a "noise complaint." Really, now that he's recovered from his URI, it's simply too small a space for such a hugely-energetic cat anyway.
I'll have the second upstairs bedroom cleared out within the week - I'm also looking into options for fully enclosing the second floor so that it's like an "apartment" all to itself, which will give me both large bedrooms, a hall, and a bathroom, easily the size of a small apartment, and I won't have to worry about confining them both in the same room while I sleep. But in the meantime, I can't let her continue to harass him.
So, I never thought it would come to this, particularly after they seemed to get off to such a great start - but I will have to segregate SOPHIE for the night. It falls in line with some things suggested by Pam Johnson-Bennett in her book (about limiting the space of an aggressor cat instead of the newcomer/"victim"), and I don't know, she might even be happy to be in a Jack-Free Zone for the night. But it breaks my heart for it to have come to this. And since I don't have adequate space for a full reintroduction yet, it's the best I can come up with - my other two options are (1) get fined for a noise violation, or (2) let Sophie continue to attack Jack when I lie down to sleep.
I brought Jack into our lives in good faith, for Sophie's sake, in the first place. After a seemingly great start, their relationship has gone steadily downhill, and it kills me. They still seem so well-matched; Jack keeps Sophie up and moving and active during their waking hours, and he's a very patient, well-intentioned little guy who still keeps trying to make friends, even when she's being very nasty to him. But I hadn't anticipated such a heated territorial dispute, and I should have. I should never have assumed that I could bring a new animal into a small space that has been 100% Sophie's for her entire life. However well-intentioned my decision to adopt Jack may have been, I truly was not prepared for this.
My family and I have adopted animals my entire life, and while we have never, and would never, rehome an animal once we made the commitment to care for it, this is a conflict on a much larger scale than we've ever experienced, and it's very disheartening. We'll get through it; after all, they do have their good moments, even some very sweet moments. That tells me that they're not just two cats that will never get along, but they need the proper space in which to live peacefully, and I haven't been giving that to them. It will take me time to correct this, though, and I fear for the setbacks that might occur in the meantime.
Sorry for the wall of text...I think I'm writing this as much for myself as anything else. Just feeling down, and like a very "bad cat mom", at the moment, and I guess I needed to vent.
and make sure you have vertical space. (Totally forgot about this!) If you get a cat tree or some other creative means of creating vertical space like do-it-yourself shelving that can create a "neutral" space that Sophie hasn't yet claimed and can even out the playing field of territory. Not to mention that having multiple levels of height can help them to establish who is alpha. My Fiona gets the top level of all the trees....because she is Queen. 
The boys are happy to be on the other levels.
However, we interfere and stop the struggles and they eventually settle down and find a peaceful solution. They don't do it at night, though.
