Skidish cats

I have a question...my cats Castor (4 y.o.) is very laid back and doesnt care a thing in the world about anything but food and sleep
but Mazzy (1 y.o) is a very skidish cat i have had for a few months and everytime you come up to her she will run no matter what, even if you are giving her food.

I was thinking that she was very seriously abused as a younger kitten, but wanted to ask you guys and see what all of you thought.

-Mazzy

I have a cat named Mazzy! It seems like yours could have been abused as a kitten. I have a cat (1 yr. old) Gingerbear who is the most friendly cat I've ever had. I raised him from a newborn with all the love and attention I could give him, but for some reason when he's out of the apartment or sees "new" people come over he freaks out! He goes completely crazy trying to hide and his heart starts racing real fast.

That could be a possibility. It could be a lot of other things, too. She may not have had much contact with people before you came into her life. Feral mom cats do a really good job of instilling fear of humans into their kits.

My Ophelia is pretty skittish, too. She will run from me and her Daddy if we don't approach her in just the right way, and sometimes she still runs. She had a pretty traumatic beginning. She was stuck between the walls in our apartment building for 8 hours that I heard her crying, and who knows how long before that. She was only about 6 weeks old and got separated from mama cat. She has gotten a lot better, and loves to nap on a lap, but she doesn't like to be approached unless she really knows for sure it is me or hubby.

Going to move this to the proper forum

Mazzy will come up to you if ou are sitting down, she will also come and lay down with me when i go to sleep.

She only will run if you walk up to her and try to pet her or if you give her some food then walk up to her after that to get her to eat it.

She does like it thought when you play with her, with a string. But if you start playing with Castor and she sees it she will run and still the attention. Even though she is skiddish she loves to get the attention.

I used to have a cat who was skidish too, and I found a lot of consistent TLC and reassurance helped. There are a lot of strays and ferals in my area, and I had always felt my cat had either been a feral kitten or mistreated by humans. My cat had been discovered wandering the streets alone when she was about two months old and rescued by a no-kill shelter. She lived at the shelter until I adopted her six months later. This cat trusted me completely from the very beginning, and then later learned to trust my son. For a number of years my son and I were the only ones who could touch or approach her.

A couple of things that helped calm the cat down were that we always approached in a slow reassuring manner especially in the very beginning, and made sure all the cat's interactions with us were very positive. When we started seeing progress in her behavior, we encouraged it with a lot of praise and food rewards. The cat eventually learned that other people could be trusted too, and during the last two or three years of her life she was a pretty normal acting cat.

She sounds like my Pearl. I got her at 5 months, and she had been badly abused. She will soon be 2 years old, and she is still very skittish. Just in the past few weeks she has been more outgoing than she ever has. She will just now tolerate being petted while sitting on the floor. She is getting better consistently, where she has done so in short periods, before retiring to the closet for months. It has taken a lot of patience, but we are making progress.