THIS IS LONG - PLEASE STICK WITH IT, I NEED HELP!!
Hi all - am at the end of my tether... but there's no actual end to this tether because me and DH don't want to ever get rid of one of our cats!
We have 3 female house cats. 2 of them are very similar in age and both will be 3yo in Feb. They have been together since they were 8 weeks old, always got on - slept together, cleaned one another, very affectionate.
Then RANDOMLY one month ago, shit hit the fan. I was with them both in my bedroom when the howling started, the hissing and a massive fight ensued - poo and wee everywhere. One of them actually just wee'd on the spot, then launched into attack. It's nowhere near play fighting - they literally were fighting to the death. When me and DH tried to separate, it was impossible to actually pull them apart and they got incredibly aggressive towards us, lashing out. In the end, we used water to distract them but even then it took a while to get them into separate rooms. There was a really intense hate, the sounds they were both making were terrible.
We had plugged in Feliway the week before this happened as we'd found some cheeky patches of wee. It's not a big deal, they've been known to do it before if they're not 100% happy with their FIVE litter trays!
The day after the first fight, they seemed to have recovered and were sleeping together when again, out of nowhere, the real nastiness started, along with the wee and poo and terrible noises. (Our third cat is a little Persian baby, she just runs away and hides and they leave her alone).
The two girls have now been separated for over a month, but we've tried to reintroduce them through the glass doors, but even a month on, just the sight of each other drives them crazy, and the hissing and growling starts.
It's getting pretty hard to keep them separated - just last night, one of them ran out of the bedroom when DH quickly opened the door and they had another fight. Wasn't as intense as the first, but still pretty bad. Again, could only separate them by using water. Don't know how much longer we can live like this - one of them stays with baby Persian in the lounge/hallway/garage (we made the garage a cat playroom, so there's five rooms in total for them to chill in) and one of the 'naughty' ones has our bedroom. The litter trays in each room are driving us crazy, and it's generally so unfair to keep one of them cooped up in the bedroom all day while we're at work.
However - we ADORE these cats, and it's just too hard to even think about trying to rehome one of them. They are ours, our responsibility and even if we did want to rehome, I'm pretty sure everywhere round here is too full to take one of them (I couldn't choose one to rehome even if I tried :() and we have no friends that would want to take one. They are such lovely cats, I just want everything to go back to normal :(
Has anyone got any experience of how to deal with this? Vets were useless, just asked if one of them was ill (no) and said just buy some Feliway. Have had it plugged in since the week before it kicked off, I know it takes a while but I think this is a deeper problem - they seem to really hate each other. Do you let cats 'fight it out'? It just seems cruel, and I'm scared they'd do some serious damage to each other.
PLEASE HELP!! Can't carry on like this :(
Please or to access all these features
Please
or
to access all these features
Join our community of cat lovers on the Mumsnet Cat forum for kitten advice and help with cat behaviour.
The litter tray
PLEASE HELP! My two cats are fighting to the death!
47 replies
Rouen · 05/11/2012 06:56
OP posts:
Don’t want to miss threads like this?
Weekly
Sign up to our weekly round up and get all the best threads sent straight to your inbox!
Log in to update your newsletter preferences.
You've subscribed!
Please create an account
To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.