What a great site!

My sister told me about this site yesterday and it's great!  I've been a cat lover for many, many years and have always had two cats.  I lost one in August of this year and until then, had two males, both about the same age that were best buddies.  My sister and Mom, who always put up with my cats but never had one are now both parents to cats.  My mom has one and my sister has two. They've joined me in my love of cats so that's great for all of us!

I just adopted a feral cat this week who had been trapped and spayed and had her rabies shot. This is my first female.  All of my cats over the years have been from shelters or places where they were taken in by an agency who rescued animals from being put down.

She (I named her Boo as she's a beautiful black beauty!) is ensconced in my spare bedroom and seems to be adjusting very well to being indoors. She was being feed and I'm sure fawned over but was strictly an outdoor cat.  I will be keeping her as strictly an indoor cat and I don't feel it's going to be a problem for her.

She's about 6 months old and just a sweetheart.  Took to the litter pan right away and is eating and drinking well and loves to be held so she can purr her head off. 

I have another senior male cat, Sterling, who is 14 and haven't really introduced them yet. I did take a few minutes, holding Boo, with Sterling sitting nearby and they sniffed each others' noses without any great reaction on the part of either one.  Sterling was definately underwhelmed and Boo was calm.  

Other than that, I have kept Boo in her own room and she is now out from under the bed after only 2 days.  I was having to coax her out each time but now she's in plain site when I go in.

I will spending a lot of time on here looking for advice and help on many things but right now am mostly interested in making sure the integration of my new kitty with my senior car goes well. 

If anyone would like to steer me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated.

So glad my sister pointed me here!

Hi and welcome to The Cat Site!

Here's an article that may help you a bit:

http://www.thecatsite.com/a/introducing-cats-to-cats

You can always start a thread in our Behavior area if you have more specific questions.

http://www.thecatsite.com/f/5/behavior

Thanks for the welcome.  It looks like I broke the first rule already letting them sniff each other's noses.  I'm off to get some help in one of the forums!

DebM said:

 
Thanks for the welcome.  It looks like I broke the first rule already letting them sniff each other's noses.  I'm off to get some help in one of the forums!

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Its no great danger with it.  Not with two cats who by all signs to tell, are healthy.   And good you know already, there will not be any great problems with intro later on.

I did wrote some response to your post in our Ferale and Stray Forum.

Mentioning, she doesnt sound as truly ferale.  She must either got some fostering, or had a home and got astray / got dumped.

Welcome, and Good luck!

Welcome to the forum and congratulations on the adoption of Boo.

The first thing I always do is spread and mingle scents.So I rub each cat with a cloth, and then switch cloths, so I rub the scent of the new cat onto the resident cat and vice versa.

I also swap sleeping beds, and offer the new cat a well-worn garment of mine to sleep on, which I will drop somewhere the resident cats love to sit, so they experience the mixture of my scent mixed with that of the new cat.

That way, they will not be totally unknown to each other when they meet, as smell is a very important sense for cats, and the emell of the other cat will already be part of their environment by the time they meet.