The Great Escape
Over the last several months we have been trying desperately to make the extremely adorable Luna… a part of our family. Unfortunately things are not working amazingly well… because it feels like for every step forward we take a half dozen steps backwards. You ever seen one of those acts that juggles plates… well I have three plates precariously trying to hurdle themselves at the floor. If I can keep one cat happy… it seems like the others are in a total sense of disarray. In theory we probably should have said a month ago that this was not going to work out, and tried to take her back to the rescue shelter that we got her from. However she is such a remarkable cat… when none of the other cats are around. The positive is that it has been at least a week since a major fight, but we have been keeping Luna carefully sequestered from Kenzie and Allie. One of the ideas we had over the weekend was to install a baby gate. We of course knew that we would need a really tall one, so after a little searching we found one that was 36 inches tall and that once installed had a door in it that swung open to let us in and out of it. At first she hopped up on a little table and bounded over the gate… which required me to now move said gate out to the garage. After that however things seemed to be working pretty well.
The gate let the other cats stare in at her, and more importantly smell her in a setting that they were very familiar with… namely the bedroom where they already slept regularly. There was a little hissing back and forth but no charging. Luna is basically Belghast in Cat form… and whenever she is threatened she charges at danger much like my warrior character. Which is the huge problem we are having. Instead of a lot of hissing going on back and forth… and then cats going off to their corner to sulk for a bit like we have dealt with in previous interactions between foreign cats, we have charging. When I mean charging I mean running and jumping on the other cat and rolling around like mad around the house until momentum finally breaks them free charging. The positive there is that it has been awhile since this actually happened, but that is largely only because we are keeping them separated. Luna has been kept in my wife’s office which we set up to be a cat suite, with food, water and a litter box. The problem is… Luna really wants to roam freely because she likes the bedroom which is shared territory. So the theory was when I got home I would move her to the bedroom and let her chill under the bed. She is pretty good at meowing at me when she needs to go upstairs, at which time I carry her up on my shoulder and let her get food, water and more importantly use the bathroom.
This state of equilibrium seemed to be working. The other two cats were calming down, and starting to get back into their normal routines… although Kenzie has regressed a bit. All of this however was the case until last night when Luna apparently figured out how to dead jump over the gate. So the reality of this situation is that the gate does a great job of keeping the other two cats out of the bedroom, who are both fat and lazy… but that doesn’t really solve the problem at hand. The amount of stress that this whole situation has caused me is pretty intense, given that it feels like my home is in a constant state of chaos. I don’t handle chaos for extended periods of time very well. I am trying to do whatever I can to stabilize it, but it feels like when I get one plate spinning… two other plates try and topple. Much of our strategy has been that I hang with Kenzie and Allie and my wife hangs with Luna… which works great during the weekend when we are both off but does not work at all during the work week when our get home times are so drastically varied. Mostly at this point we feel extremely invested in the situation and it would break our hearts if we have to say goodbye, but I am rapidly running out of ideas. We have tried so many things, and so far none of them are really working. I keep hoping that time is the key and that things will calm down eventually when they realize that they have more in common than they have different. Personality wise the three of them should be getting along amazingly well. Luna is almost perfectly situated halfway between the personalities of Allie and Kenzie. If we can just get her past the initial attack instinct when she is afraid we might make progress.
