We have a 4 or 5 year old tortie cat, Snickers. I have had her since she was approx 4 weeks old, I found her in a garbage bag. When I moved out of my parents house she came with me and went from sharing a home with another cat and a dog (both whom she grew up with) to being alone. She became very needy and annoying, waking us up at 2am to play and such. After a year of this, trying lots of different things, we decided she needed a friend. So, a month and a half or so ago we adopted Ruthie. She is a 3 year old tortie manx.
For the first week we kept them seperate, locking one the the bedroom one day, and swapping rooms each day with short free roam sessons. They seemed to get along ok, no fighting, so they have been both having free roam since. We have 2 litter boxes, 2 sets of food/water dishes and an extra (3rd) water dish. The litter boxes are on opposite sides of the aparment and their food/water dishes are in different rooms (mainly because of space). There are 5 cat beds, 2 bought new when we got Ruthie and 1 cat tree, which we vaccumed and cleaned when we got Ruthie. The first couple meetings I rubbed them both down with catnip to try to make them smell similar
Now the problem . . . Every time snickers (the first cat) walks by Ruthie, Ruthie goes after her, hitting her in the face. Anytime Snickers comes near us if Ruthie is in the room Ruthie goes after her. We immedatly stop paying any attention to either of them when this happens. On the rare times Ruthie does not do this we give her lots of extra attention. Also, if Ruthie finishes her food first she will go and scare snickers away from her dish and finish her food (we stop her when we see her doing this). Snickers is literally double the size of Ruthie but apparently is a total push over. She used to do this to the cat and dog she grew up with, but more playing. Ruthie is not playing.
Will they work this out or is there something we should be doing?
