Background, Pt. 1

(Because I do tend to ramble on about our cats, I will try to make this an abbreviated version of what we've been going through. However, if you read through this and have questions, feel free to comment or e-mail.)

A little background: We started out with two cats. Our first was The Big Acoustic Kitty, adopted in December, 1998. Our second was The Electric Mayhem, adopted in October, 2000. These two have never gotten along. We did try to follow the advice we'd heard about letting them hear and smell each other from opposite sides of a door and to move their food dishes close to each other so that they would associate good things (kibble) with the other cat. Well, it didn't work. Later on, we discovered that there is a lot more to it than that, but by they time we figured that out, several years had gone by and the personalities of both cats were such that we never even considered reintroducing them. We just invested in a baby gate and divided the house in half. That actually worked pretty well, and we expected to just leave it at that for the rest of somebody's life.

In July of 2008, we adopted a wonderful new kitty from one of our local shelters. Adopting #3 was the furthest thing on our mind ... but it just sort of happened. And actually, from an introduction standpoint, things worked pretty well. We read up on cat introductions ("Cat vs. Cat" by Pam Johnson-Bennett was our bible) and followed the instructions to the letter. Ziggy settled right in and while the two senior cats didn't adore Zigg, he thought they were great and for the most part everyone got along.

In August of 2009, we lost our beloved Ziggy-Bean to cancer. It turned out he was FIV/FeLV positive, even though the testing that the shelter had done had come back negative.

Well ... that's where our current story sort of begins. In the last few days before Ziggy passed away, The Amazing Husbandini and I talked about the fact that we thought we would try to adopt again. The hole our Ziggy left was enormous, and we honestly felt like we would need to bring in another kitty to help fill it.

In October of 2009, we started looking for another kitty. Looking back now, 2.5 months was probably not enough time to get over losing Ziggy, as well as dealing with everything else that was going on. (We had just bought our first house, and I'm a full-time student.) However, it felt right at the time, so we started looking. First we went to the shelter where we'd found Ziggy. Nobody "spoke" to us, though we did find one handsome grey gentleman-cat who could have been Zigg's littermate. (Much crying into this poor cat's fur ensued. I'm sure he was probably happy when we left.)

In fairly short order, we came across a pair of adoption candidates. They were living in our local PetSmart and were under the care of one of the many local rescue organizations. One was a big yellow long-haired tabby with a somewhat dopey, friendly disposition and a teeny, tiny voice. The other was a small, short-haired grey guy who looked like he had more than a couple of Russian Blues in his family tree. We both looked at them and thought that if you could combine them into one cat, you'd just about have Ziggy.

(See what I mean about 2.5 months probably not being long enough?)

Long story short, our hearts became set on this pair and we took them both home in fairly short order. We had high hopes because they seemed to get along well in the high-stress environment of PetSmart. After we got them home and got them settled together in the "sanctuary room", they still seemed to get along just fine. No mutual bathing or cuddling up together, but friendly head-butting and rubbing up against each other and peaceful co-existence all around. Some wrestling matches, certainly, but no serious biting or scratching ... nothing you wouldn't expect from two young, healthy male cats. (Both already neutered, BTW.)

So far, so good. Introductions between our two new guys and the two resident cats went fairly well ... not quite as well as they had gone with Ziggy, but well enough. Besides, we figured that introducing two new cats instead of one was bound to have a few more bumps along the way.

After everyone had progressed to the point where there were now three downstairs kitties instead of just one, (remember, BAK and EM have never gotten along and nothing had occurred to change that) we started to figure out things about our new guys' personalities: The Big Yellow Hallway Monster (BYHM) was definitely an Alpha. Not a super-aggressive Alpha, but he had his sights on the top of the feline social ladder, for sure. Little Grey Kitteh (LGK) was a little more timid ... he had to check things out repeatedly before he was comfortable, and he was liable to spook if we weren't careful. BYHM, we decided, had been a Golden Retriever in a previous life. Gorgeous, loving, friendly, and just a little bit dopey. He wasn't content to sit on the sidelines and watch, he wanted to jump in with all four paws to whatever was going on. LGK was much more cautious, and we learned to be careful when playing with him and to be careful not to draw BYHM's attention.

All in all, however, things were going as well as could be expected. However, I think the seeds of our current problems were planted in the last several weeks of the year. Recently I found a reference on cat behavior that says to allow three to six months after the completion of the introduction process before the cats actually get settled in with one another. If that's true, I wish we'd known it at the time. We might have been able to do something.

That's enough for this post. Next up: Apparently unrelated problems arise in the household.

(And in case you hadn't noticed, all kitties have aliases. Except Ziggy. I don't know why I first decided that the cats should have "blog names", but there it is. I'm not going to change it now.)