From Twitter 05-05-2010

[jsnlv]

• 07:39:53: Cat Status: they're losing it big-time. No shelf or table is safe from their madness. Angel and Koop were really attacking each other. #FB
  

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Comments

Cat Status

[(Anonymous)]

Some of your "children" may require a firmer hand. Unacceptable actions should illicit unpleasant consequences.It may be time for the judicious application of a squirt gun.

Nah

[turandot.livejournal.com]

A squirt gun never worked with Boris, who's my kitty aggressor most of the time (Gracie would prefer it if Boris would stop bopping her on the nose every time he wants to play). It would only make him pissed at Gracie in the "now look what you've done, I've been wetted because of you!" vein.

What I usually do is assess the level of fighting. If Gracie swipes back and they do a back and forth, it's probably just rough play. If Gracie just sits there and wails like a kitten, which she sometimes does, that's pretty much her way to tell "mom, help! This savage won't leave me alone". That's when I hiss at Boris, and then when he looks up at me surprised I go "leave her be". We've done this consistently enough that he knows that if he doesn't let her be, he gets picked up (I do not scruff, I just pick him up off the floor with both arms) and put in the bathroom for 2 minutes with the door closed. The bathroom is the one room in this apartment that the cats have not taken over. It's pretty boring. Besides, Boris gets upset if he can't see people around him, so he really hates having the door closed on him. While he's in kitty jail, I then look over Gracie to make sure she's okay, which calms her down. After the 2 minutes are over, I let Boris out. He's usually cooled off enough that he goes and does something else.

Most of the time nowadays, just hissing and saying "leave her be" is enough of an incentive for Boris to stop. That is, unless he is really pissed about outside construction noise, or very bored. When he goes right back to his evil deeds, he gets a second, longer bathroom timeout (5 minutes). That usually makes him so starved for human attention that he decides he'd rather seek a human to console him about the ordeal of spending 5 minutes alone than bother the other kitty.

Sometimes redirection can work just as well: if it's a nice day and we know that the birds might be singing outside the windows, I open our balcony door (we also have a screen, that stays closed) and invariably both cats go "Birds! Birds! There's birds nearby!", and become more than happy to sit side by side in front of the screen and spy the sky for them. ;)