Christian, Shadow, dominance

I wrote earlier about the first meeting between Shadow and Christian, but as I said at the time, there was not yet harmony in Catsville.

The cats also had another session or two of seeing each other through the crack in the bathroom door. Unfortunately, each of these sessions placed me in the bathroom with Christian - there was no way to properly work the bathroom latch if I was on the outside - leaving Shadow alone. She was pretty disturbed, and when I placed her first into the carrier and then locked her into the bathroom (enabling Christian to explore the apartment some, locking Shadow into the bathroom so that she could get used to his scent, but not confront him directly) I think she became convinced that she was being replaced and I would soon be booting her out.

Christian stayed out in the apartment for the day, but shortly before I went to sleep for the night I swapped them again. Shadow looked up at me with big, sad eyes and went off to a corner to curl up and sleep, and, I suppose, to do the feline equivalent of crying. My last act before crawling into bed was to collect her from her corner and carry her to my bed - something I don't typically do - and this seemed to convince her that she wasn't about to be abandoned, though she still wasn;t too sure about the new cat.

I don't blame her for being uncertain - Christian is close to twice as big as she is (his paunch is also about twice as big as hers). Nevertheless after three or four days they not only were able to more or less tolerate each other through a gate, so I let them into the apartment together - first for only a few minutes, then for progressively longer periods.

I knew that perhaps the largest issue the cats would have to settle was that of dominance. With Scruffy, Shadow was dominant, though she rarely made use of it. She and her brother shared their food very amicably, for instance, each deferring to the other as they ate from the same dish. The only time I remember her showing dominace was at the climbing pole, which she rarely let him use.

But Shadow and Scruffy worked out their dominance issue before I met them, whereas Shadow and Christian would be doing so under my nose. I quickly discovered that I had difficulty determining whether their fights and chaces were in play or in earnest. On the one hand there wasn't any hissing or yowling, but on the other hand their ears were back much more often than when Shadow and Scruffy had wrestled. Shadow sometimes turned sideways and arched her back, bristling the hair along her spine, but just as often she had her tail in the air. Frequently they had standoffs - staring contests which were sometimes won by one cat, sometimes by the other. The issue of dominance was in doubt, and at times it seemed that the issue of Christian's successfully moving in and staying was in doubt, too.