Help! Introducing younger kitten to much larger kitten and struggling

[PurrCasso]

I have two kittens. They aren’t related. I adopted the first one (male, neutered) who is around 6 months old in May of this year, and the second one (female, not yet spayed) around 5-6 weeks ago. The second kitten is 4 months old. We’ve done the slowly slowly method. We have a very large dog play pen which we have been using to keep them separate, but in view of each other. We swap them round every now and then so each gets the run of the living room and to keep it fair.

They are calm in each other’s company as long as one of them is in the pen, or the smallest one is in the safety of my arms. But the moment I put the little one on the floor (and she is tiny compared to the bigger one), the older one ends up chasing and jumping on top of the little one. Sometimes he will bite at her neck. She lies there and does nothing until he bites harder and then she squeals, runs away, and he will chase her and we have to separate them. I always panic when this happens because I’m scared he might hurt her.

Ive tried the Feliway plug in for a while but it’s not made any difference.

I’m at a loss as to what to do now. I spoke to the lady at the cat charity where I adopted them from, and she thinks I should just let them get on with it and only separate them if it gets really nasty, but I’m apprehensive because it looks awful when he’s jumping on and chasing her. She can get under the sofa, whereas he can’t do so, so there is somewhere she can hide, but I’m still nervous about taking the plunge.

Should I just do what the charity has advised, or does anyone have any other advise? It’s been weeks now and it’s tricky having to keep them physically apart all the time.

I will try and attach a photo of them so you can see the size difference.

It sounds like normal play to me. The smaller female is reacting to his play biting quite normally. They'll soon get used to each other, I'd give the female somewhere to escape if the male gets a little too much for her.

Are you sure the jumping isn’t playful? My girls jump all over each other and bite but they are just playing. I kind of agree with the lady from the shelter abour letting them get on with it, as long as you’re in the room a few handbags between them is fine they are finding their place.

I think it probably is just playing. I’ve heard it can look worse than it actually is. A couple of weeks ago, there was an interaction where they were rolling around and a bit of fur was flying, but I’m hoping we’ve moved on since then. She very rarely hisses at him now - she did it once yesterday, but that was the first time in about four weeks.
I think I’m just going to have to be brave, as I feel like I’m holding them back from getting used to being together without the barrier of the playpen. I have a feeling that the fact they hardly get to be together without one of them being in the pen might be making it into a novelty, and that’s why they get so excitable, which then leads to it escalating.

I've recently introduced two kitty's. One almost 11 month old neutered Female and one 4 month old female who isn't neutered. Our intros have gone amazingly, I did a week of scent swapping and kept the new kitty firstly in daughter's bedroom and then we moved her between front room and daughters room, older kitty goes outside and in the summer we spend most the time in the kitchen anyway so she wasn't fussed about not going in the lounge and her routine changing. We had a hiss from our older kitty when she first saw her new little kitty sister in her travel basket on way to vets on day 2 and a growl on another occasion but our older kitty started sniffing and sitting outside the room little kitty was in and on about day 7 I let them meet, for the next week every time they saw each other I gave them both treats, tasty licks or something, but kept time together short. We're coming up to week 3 now and over the last week they have become the best of friends already, they spend hours playing and chasing, our big kitty is mostly really quite gentle with little kitty and they even choose to sleep on the same bed when napping in the day and at night. I left them both with the run of the house Friday when I was at work, but as I said older kitty can go out so they're not stuck together. What Feliway did you use? I bought the Feliway friends, I don't know if that's what's helped but I actually can't believe how well they're getting along. It says it takes 7 days to start working, it might be worth a try. Also if you don't think it's going as well as it should be I read to just start again from scratch. A pic included of our girls chilling together. Good luck x

Hi, glad it worked out well with your two kitties 😊 I’m using the Felliway Friends diffuser as well.

Well I finally plucked up the courage to try again this morning. I cut a hole in a box that only she can fit in and this helps. They had a few what I think were play fights. She instigated it sometimes. I left the living room door open as well to give her an extra escape route. At the end it did get out and he did his usual jump on and tussle with her and she started doing the frantic screeching, so I’ve separated them for now and will try again later. After I separated them she seemed perfectly happy, playing with toys and seemed pretty chilled.

It’s awful when she does the helpless sounding screaches because she’s so little and I worry so much that he could hurt her. I’m really hoping being in the same vicinity becomes more normalised over time and it doesn’t escalate like it did just now.

I tried to upload a video but it won’t let me for some reason so here are some stills from it.

Updating this for anyone else going through the same thing. So we have persevered with it all day, and amazingly we have had a lot of time where they are in the same room without fighting. If it gets heated, we get the laser pointer out and it distracts them. To start with I had to pick up the bigger kitten and distract them when it got too rough, but overall I think we have made a lot of progress today. The older kitten has looked like he wanted a snooze on a couple of occasions but we haven’t got to the stage where they are snoozing in the same vicinity yet.

Im feeling a lot more confident that we can get them to live harmoniously eventually. If anyone else is going through the same, dont give up, it should get better with perseverance.

It's all very stressful but glad to hear things are improving slightly. Keep at it, hopefully they'll be best of buddies in no time.