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There's no getting around it. Our Telstar is a lonely fluff. He tears around the house, howling mournfully, trying to get into all the rooms and the cupboards and searching futilely under the beds. (Usually at 4 AM.) We're fairly certain he's looking for his brother. Our neighbour has found him several times, sitting on the pavement in front of the house, where he never used to go, looking expectantly over the road.
We try to play with him. He loves his springy fishy toy and wiggled fingers in stairwell bannisters. He loves toes under duvets and bubbles in the bath. But it's not the same and he knows it. He wants the rough-and-tumble followed by napping that he had with Sputnik. He wants tail-swipes from chair perches and tussles for the last scrap of gooshy food.
So we've decided that after we move - which was supposed to be at the start of this month but is looking more like it will be June - we'll get him a new friend. Fortuitously (for us, anyway), one of my workmates has a brother living near our new place. Two weeks ago, he adopted a cat for his five-year-old daughter. The cat was looking a little green when they got her, so they took her to the vet. Three days later, they had five cats. The kittens are still too small to be adopted, but by the time we move they should be nearly big enough. We've asked for a male.
Telstar will probably never be as close to the new cat as he was to Sputnik, but we're hoping that he'll bond with the little one and this will help curb his newly developed eccentric tendencies. (Particularly, looking for his brother in cupboards at 4 AM.) If anyone has tips for introducing cats to one another with a minimum of mutual fur loss, please do post here.
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Unfortunately some visitors showed up the same day Bean did, and I'd left Bean downstairs playing with them, assuming that they'd keep her occupied while I went upstairs to look for Kosh and that Bean was probably too small to cope with stairs anyway.
It turned out I was wrong, and Bean followed me up the stairs. I only discovered this when Kosh emerged from the spare room like Smaug the Golden at the Battle of the Five Armies. After that, there was about a fortnight of Kosh hissing, me frantically trying to placate Kosh and suffering agonies that Bean would have to be returned to the breeder, and Bean obliviously doing kitten stuff and sleeping in boxes before it all settled down.
I think most of the problem was that Kosh doesn't really like other cats much anyway and had been used to being a lone cat, so it'll probably all go a lot better with Telstar because he's more sociable. They get on well enough now and Kosh will occasionally hold Bean down and wash her ears.
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Ah, my delusions are getting grander and grander! (That will be six million Altarian dollars.)
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They do play-fight a lot, but they don't have serious battles. I think this is because Bean is a very stupid Giant Cat, and has never worked out that while when she arrived she was half the size of Kosh, this is no longer the case. Or maybe she thinks Kosh is her mum. Or maybe Kosh thinks she's Bean's mum. I have no idea what goes on in their fluffy heads, really. They certainly get very agitated if I try to feed them in separate bowls or shut them in rooms with separate litter trays, which is awkward when Bean has digestive troubles.
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A kitten might be ideal because they do love that kind of roughhousing and playtime as they grow. I really hope it works out. :) We had good luck introducing our youngest dog to the other two because her survival/communication responses were all puppyish, still, and she would be ~*~SPARKLEADORABLE~*~ instead of aggressive when challenged.
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Seeing the kitten through a carrier door might be a good way to start introducing them to one another. Thank you for that, too!
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A kitten ought to be great fun and comfort for him *and* for you!
Experience suggests that a female kitten might be accepted more easily and fit in better, long term. Same-sex siblings co-exist ok, but same-sex strangers tend to get into dominance struggles as the kitten ages, with attendant spray-marking of living spaces and such and other unpleasantness. Telstar might bond better with female, too. Then when she grows up and begins trying to boss him around he won't fight back in any serious way. It should also be *hilarious* to watch!
The only bit of acclimation input I can add is to give Telstar a great deal of cuddles and reassurance throughout - lots of physical affection.
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I'd look into this, too. I do have same-sex non-siblings, but it was a solid 3-year adjustment period, and there is still more conflict than there was between either of them and the roommate's boy-cat I lived with for a year and a half or so (granted, it's mostly unidirectional conflict, because one of my cats doesn't know how to fight back, but still).
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Thank you, this is very good to know. I know that Telstar & Sputnik never stopped battling for dominance, but their fights were never that serious. I can imagine they might escalate if Telstar were paired with a male kitten of unknown origin.
What is the thinking on introducing *two* kittens to an established male cat? Would it be good to get a pair of female kittens? (We've been asked if we'd take a pair and have agreed to consider it...)
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It should be adorable watching Telstar watch them bouncing around in that popcorn way kittens have. I bet he'll be all, "What is UP with these two?"
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They did swat her occasionally to tell her that they weren't in the mood for chasing games, but that was it.
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Also, we wondered, on the occasions of the deaths of two cats, whether we should have invited the remaining one[s] to sniff the bodies before we buried them, just so they would know what had happened. We didn't do that. Not too long after Sasha died (hit by a car, we think, while hunting birds, her favorite activity), Silas went on walkabout for several days. Was he looking for her? Did he get closed in somebody's garage? Don't know; in the event he returned safely, as if nothing had happened, tanked up and wanted to go out again (by which time we had closed the cat door).
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We didn't let Telstar see Sputnik's body, though I did carry it through the house after I pulled him out of the hedge. I now wonder if that was a mistake. :/
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When we first let them loose, Kheldar zoomed around the house like unto Speedy Gonzales on amphetamines. (He kept that up for 36 hours before keeling over asleep on my lap on Sunday night...) He seemed to be convinced that there was only going to be enough food, warmth and happiness for one cat and he was determined to be the cat. Shadow took one look at his surroundings and went to ground behind the washing machine where he sat and shivered unhappily until we pried him out. ("OMG! Humans=bad! Large black and white furry maniac=bad! Cannot cope.")
So Shadow got to be the kitten and went to live in the spare room and Kheldar got the run of the house. After a couple of days we started letting Kheldar sniff around the door and then into the room for supervised visits. We had to stop him from bopping Shadow on the nose a few times but that behaviour trailed off quite rapidly.
Once they'd established that the spare room belonged to Shadow and the rest of the house belonged to Kheldar we were able to leave the door open all the time although we did have to chase Kheldar out when he was being too boisterous. Shadow's problems were more to do with humans than Kheldars so eventually he started creeping out to explore the house after we'd gone to bed (we could track his progress by the fur he left on the carpets) and one morning Kheldar decided that all cat feeding should take place in the kitchen and that Shadow obviously needed someone to show him how to be a proper cat and trotted upstairs, rounded Shadow up and brought him downstairs in broad daylight for breakfast. After that they were the best of friends. Except for the times when Shadow goes to sleep on Kheldar and Kheldar wakes up hot and sweaty and cross or Kheldar gets onto a lap that Belongs To Shadow...
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For the first few weeks, it might be good for them to have separate chill out zones, and separate litter arrangements.
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I think we'll probably keep the kittens in one room until they're vaccinated/fixed and let Telstar have the run of the rest of the house, so he doesn't feel pushed out by the new arrivals.
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But he's an odd duck as cats go.
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Jaz is not so tolerant, but he will offer his tummy if he's in the mood.