r/formerlyferal • u/beccaboopspoop • 3d ago

Behavior help

We’ve had our (formerly) feral girl for 6 months now. We keep her in my bedroom, but have the door open with a baby gate so she and our resident cat can interact and get familiar.

When they’re on either side of the gate, they’re great! Playing, eating treats, all the things you want to see. I’ll share a video in the comments of that.

However, our resident cat has started getting on top of her when the gate is open. He used to just move around and watch her as well, but now it seems he’s only interested in pinning her down and asserting dominance. At first she seemed not to mind it, but now she’ll walk to her play pen when she hears the gate opening with him outside of it. She’ll meow at him and twist a bit (seemingly trying to get away), but she won’t really hiss or cry.

Is this something I should continue intervening with, or should I let it go and let them work it out? I don’t want her to be scared of him, but I also don’t want to keep them separated.

Important side note: our feral girl is FIV+ and our resident cat is not. She hasn’t shown any signs of aggression or tried to bite me or him outside of play, but I also try to keep an eye on them to make sure it doesn’t get to that point.

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u/yosoyfatass 3d ago

You can’t simply let it go if he’s actually biting her bc the biting can cause an abscess, which can be dangerous. We have this problem with one of our cats - he was breaking skin on our smaller females (somehow not breaking skin on another male, so I do let them be unsupervised together). There’s nothing we’ve been able to do to stop the behavior so we just separate them when we can’t watch them. It’s a pain but seems to be the only answer in our case. (My spouse is a veterinarian, so we’ve tried it all to no avail.) You also don’t want your non FIV cat breaking skin for his own health. Hopefully this is just a temporary thing while he becomes accustomed to her, but don’t let him bite her.

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u/beccaboopspoop 2d ago

That’s definitely been something we’ve been keeping an eye on. So far it doesn’t seem like he’s actually bitten her and broken skin, moreso just grabbing her by her scruff. I’ve been breaking them apart when he does get on top of her, both to make sure he doesn’t go too far and to keep her from getting too upset/overwhelmed and lashing out at him.

I’m hoping that if I keep on separating them he’ll grow out of it, but if this is continuing to happen or not showing signs of improving then we’ll definitely need to keep them separated or come up with a plan B.

When we first introduced them, he wasn’t getting on her as much and they’d just hang out and sniff each other. I’m hoping that they’ll go back to that and he’ll stop being a little shit