Help Your Dog Get Along With An Aggressive Cat
Have you ever heard of a cat attacking a dog? I have. Ours. He’s 12 and apparently in excellent shape.
Rorschach has always been an aggressive cat, but he’s limited his biting to inside the house. It’s our fault. We’d never taught him good boundaries. When he was young we’d wave our finger back and forth and he would attack it. We thought it was so cute. Now that he’s 15 pounds it ain’t so cute anymore. Ugh. I guess I have to admit, I also didn’t understand, until recently, that he likes a lot of personal space. I’d rough house with him and he’d bite me to let me know he’d had enough. He was speaking to me and I should have listened. Instead I created a monster.
When Rorschach started stalking dogs it was kind of funny since we’d never heard of such a thing, but when he started attacking them we realized we had a serious problem. We didn’t know what to do. It couldn’t be the office stress getting to him because the only things working in our photography studios were us. So we talked to a cat behaviorist at our local Humane Society and did research on the web.
It turns out our little fluffy was probably peeved. We’d been out of town for a while and the cat sitter apparently didn’t cut it. Rorschach was taking his anger out on dogs, but only certain types of dogs, dogs who acted like prey. Rorschach could sniff them out. He also appeared to be defending his territory. When he was out of the house, by himself, he was a sweet angel kitty. It was only when we were outside with him that he became aggressive. It was almost like he was saying to us, “Okay, you’re home now. Nothing is going to get near you, you’re all mine!” Then he would scare off whoever got too close.
So what did we do? We kept him in the house until, a month or two later, he was safe to let outside. And we employed behavior modification techniques.
Here’s what we learned:
There are a few big reasons a cat will attack a dog: self defense, territorial aggression, and if the dog shows signs of being potential prey.
In order to create a good relationship between a dog and an aggressive cat there are a number of things that can be done. Here are a few:
- The dog and the cat’s food and litter box should be in separate rooms to reduce wars over territory.
- Give each animal his own items including toys, bed and food bowls. Again, this reduces territorial skirmishes.
- In cases where cat aggression is severe, create separate spaces for the two animals.
