 Purred: Fri Jul 3, '09 6:47pm PST |
 | |  | | right now we have four resident kitties, two humans. three are mine, one belongs to my roommate. poor churrah...until he was ten he was an only kitty. then came kaya & shyloh. then came rhymon. then came meayah. then shyloh & meayah moved out, taking their human with them. if you're keeping track:
1. churrah was alone.
2. churrah suddenly was presented with two kittens.
3. a few months later, churrah was saddled with another kitten.
4. about three months later, in came another kitten. there are four other felines, two kittens, two barely a year old.
5. one kitten and one young cat leave-down to two other kitties. three total counting the long-suffering churrah cat.
then the feral cat i'd made friends with had kittens, and i brought the whole fam damily indoors for awhile.
6. churrah is assaulted by three more kittens and one adult (aggressive) momcat.
two babies were adopted out, momcat turned out to NOT NOT NOT want to be an inside kitty, and one kitten decided she was ours.
7. churrah regrets to state that a loss of three out of four unwanted kitties is not a net gain.
no, seriously. churrah loves kaya, is mostly indifferent to rhymon, and still suspicious of little jadyn...but does not seem particularly traumatized. all those changes, with a senior cat, and he's been fine. our house is three bedroom, but the third bedroom is basically fit for a smurf convention...it's where we kept the little cat family when we brought them in. besides the bedrooms we have 1 and a half baths, a hallway, a large public room, and a kitchen. and four cats. and two humans. and it works.
there are many windows, which helps. there are many places to hide, and many places to congregate. there are many litterboxes, and there is vertical territory, which is important with multiple cats. i think it actually helps our cats' nerves that we're sort of cluttered and that there are gaps between the furniture and the walls. there IS open space, but there are also lots of niches and corners and boxed away spaces-in short, lots of easily defined territory.
we have a small cat tree (i call it the cat shrub), a cat bed, a cat play cube and a fleece blankie. everything else is our furniture and "stuff", which the cats co-opt as necessary. it's not square footage (pawage?) you need to think in...it's do you have adequate "cliffs", "caves", "box canyons", "trees" and "fields"...scaled down, yes...but they need to be there. |  |  | |  |
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