Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Cat fight!


Since moving into our new house Peter has realized that he is not our only child. A few weeks ago he started noticing and being completely fascinated with our cat, Angel Food Cake. Now, Peter is thrilled every time he sees her. He reaches out for her, tried to hug her, pet her, and will not take his eyes off of her if she is in his site.

This made me a little nervous because, although Angel Food Cake is very loving to me, she is a stray and has a little bit of a feisty personality. She nips and bats at people's hands when they try to pet her, pounces on legs of people when they walk by, and generally has an attitude of her way or the highway. With Peter, however, she is totally tolerant. She lets him "pet" her (i.e. grab handfuls of her fur), hug her (which has involved grabbing her ears and whiskers and pull her toward him), and even let him give her "kisses" (which one time was putting her whole nose in his mouth - I am working on teaching him to kiss with a closed mouth).

So, as you can see, they are best buddies!

However, there is also a new enemy in the neighborhood.

This weekend Peter was taking his nap and I was in the kitchen when I heard a scream. Thinking it was coming from the baby monitor I ran upstairs, only to find Peter fast asleep in his crib. Totally freaked out (and confused) I ran back down to the living room, where I could still hear the noises getting louder. There was Angel Food Cake, paws on the glass door, literally screaming at a trespassing cat in the backyard. After 15 minutes I finally got the cat to leave, but she has come back everyday since. What’s worse is that everyday Angel Food Cake get even more aggressive and angry at the other cat. Today she was literally pouncing on the window and hissing for over 20 minutes.

Someone please tell me what we can do to make this stop!!!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

We had this problem with one of our cats back in the day. Every time a strange cat came in the yard, Otis would SCREAM (and as this often happened in the middle of the night, it took a while each time before we could process what was happening). He would usually then turn around and attack our other cat, Milo. Milo and Otis were usually best buds, but I guess this intruder got him so upset that he temporarily didn't recognize his buddy. I noticed that this was something only Otis would do, even though we had 3 other cats. It also so happens that Otis was the "alpha male" of our little pride. So usually the best thing we could do was to pet him, try to calm him down and let him know that we're in charge and that we can protect ourselves from other cat intruders and go out and chase the other cat away. I'm sure you've already been doing this, so I'm not sure what to suggest. A spray bottle has usually been the best way to say "no" to cats, but if they're really upset, I'm not sure they "get it". :(