Good evening, Kibitzers. As many of you know, I recently moved in with the BF, and one of the major areas of concern was whether or not the cats would acclimate to each other. His cat Autumn had a brother before (who died last year), but my cat Zoe has had pretty close to zero interaction with other cats. I was convinced that, even if Autumn was willing to warm up to Zoe, there was no way Zoe was going to get used to sharing her home with another cat.
Well, as you can tell by the title and the picture above, I was (thankfully) wrong. I thought I’d share a few pictures tonight documenting their progress.
This was Zoe on move-in day. I call this the moon landing pic. This was in the office, the room in which we planned to keep Zoe most of the time. Zoe had other plans, and despite her initial fear, she would conquer and claim the rest of the apartment within a few days.
Autumn was just as scared at first, and she would stay scared. She self-contained herself in our bedroom and didn’t emerge for many days. Which worked well, since as you can see above, Zoe had no intention of being contained anywhere, and we knew we needed to keep the cats separated.
We planned to keep the cats separated for a full month. It ended up being closer to three weeks. Early interactions took place mostly under the bedroom door, where the cats would occasionally extend their paws. This separation continued many days after Autumn started expressing interest in leaving the bedroom, and it became harder and harder to enforce. Eventually, about three weeks in, we decided to open the door and see what happened.
It was disheartening, to say the least. It started with a sniff, and it ended with hissing and swatting, and finally, one of them (I can’t remember which one) chased the other in a rage.
We established a policy of leaving the door open when we were home, so we could be there to break up fights if they happened. At night and when we were gone, the door remained closed. This went on for a couple of weeks, and the cats shows little to no sign of real adjustment to each other. But then, slowly but surely, they began to tolerate each other’s existence in the same room. But only from a distance, and with more than a little suspicion:
Eventually, as long as they were at a safe distance, we no longer had to worry if they were in the same room. Spending the evening in the living room as a big family became a nightly tradition. And it was perfectly fine, as long as Autumn (who was always the more outgoing one) didn’t try anything crazy, like climbing the cat tower when Zoe was on it (that only happened once before Autumn learned her lesson).
Pretty soon, they were okay being close to each other during feeding time. There was something about breakfast that brought the two of them together for a brief time each morning—their shared hunger was their opportunity for bonding, I guess.
From there, it kind of just fell into place. We didn’t even really notice, it happened so naturally. At a certain point, though, we realized: “Holy shit, the cats get along now.” They still get into spats when one of them (usually Autumn) steps over the line. But they almost seem like sisters now. They’re not best friends most of the time, but they tolerate each other. And every once in a while, they show a little love to each other (scroll down for proof).
We even had an authentic family moment the other day when I got home from work:
So yes, Autumn and Zoe are sisters at last. I’m worried that if they get any closer, they might start plotting against us.
What do you want to kibitz about tonight?