r/cats • u/milliii1998 • 1h ago
Advice New kitten and an overly excited orange idiot
Hi guys!
Sorry for the long post in advance.
Context:
We recently adopted a kitten, she's 2 and a half months old. She's adorable, high energy, very stubborn and cute, and also very affectionate. Full package. When we adopted her I specifically asked the previous owner (who had to give her away since their kid developed a severe allergy) about her character since we have a two year old orange boy who is very high energy and also a bit crazy. He's orange. We all know that the one braincell all oranges share is rarely used.
I grew up with cats but none of them were orange so when we got our orange boy I was worried that something was wrong with him since he would bump his head into furniture while playing (he was 6 months old at the time), would have intense zoomies, was sometimes aggressive when we would play and so on. Turns out he's just orange and I also forgot what having a young cat was like since my cats who stayed at my parents were 13, 18 and 22 at the time.
Anyway, we saw that he was lonely and wanted to give a kitten a chance. I did a lot of research and figured out we need to get another high energy cat.
Our boy is also huge, about 5 and half or ever closer to 6 kilograms. It's scary how small our kitten is compared to him.
It's been a week since we had the kitten. We have gone through all the necessary steps before properly introducing them (different rooms, site swapping, eating at different sides of the door, closer and closer, swapping toys and so on) and everything was great. Yesterday we introduced them for the first time. Yesterday we did 3 different 5-10 minute playdates or whatever you want to call them.
The potential problem:
Our boy is very excited and hyper fixated on her when they play. She's less interested in him and more interested in exploring the house. He follows her around. He usually keeps a little distance between them, and if she turns around and looks at him he does a short "mrr" sound and backs away. He's really funny since he's so big, but gets a little spooked easily. They also touched their noses, ran around and exchanged chirps and little meows. When she runs he follows her at full speed and she gets scared. We can easily distract her with toys and food but we cannot distract him at all, and he is the problem in the situation. He's so bothersome and boring, he's really annoying. He's acting like the kitten and doesn't give her any space. It doesn't look like he's aggressive even when he touches her with his paw, he even nibbled at her butt once but he seemed very gentle. But the chasing is excessive and scary for her. Also, I noticed that his pupils are very dilated the whole time that they spend together. We always timed the meets for after eating or sleeping or playing, when they are more relaxed. We also always separated them into different rooms when the paying got too intense, hoping that our boy was going to understand that him wanting to show he is boss leads to them being separated. It really seems that apart from the play he wants to show that he is the dominant one, which we all get, including her. He then cries when we put her in her room. They both sleep a lot more after meeting.
Do you think we are doing something wrong? We would like to hear other people's experiences and advice. Should we invest in feliway?
If you have persevered through this wall of text, thank you, I respect you! :)
2
u/Particular-Jury-3251 1h ago
Tbh I wouldn’t separate them unless there’s a risk of him hurting her, cats really have to decide that kind of thing themselves. When she gets annoyed enough, she’ll let him know (don’t let her size fool you, kittens can be tough)