Help! Mummy cat and kitten not getting on

[Hotandbothered222]

We adopted a 3 year old cat and her 4 month old boy kitten earlier this year, and all was great at first. Now boy kitten is 9 months old and I don’t know if it’s the dynamic changing or what, but all is not good!

Boy kitten is fine, but mummy cat keeps growling at him, swiping at him as he goes past, and generally not happy he’s there.

She’s also been over grooming and scratching so we took her to the vet and was diagnosed with allergies…got given 2 weeks of steroids. Steroids finished, problem no better.

We’ve got feliway plugged in upstairs and downstairs and just started her on Zykelne in case that helps.

Ive never had a pair of cats before, only singles, so I don’t know if them not getting on is normal, and something they can live with? I don’t want one of them to decide they’ve had enough and disappear off somewhere! They are outdoor cats. Poor babies - I just want them to be happy!

My semi feral mum cat still has 4 of her kittens, now over 3 years old, they all live in and around our garden and she has been smacking them round the head since they were about 3 months old. She launches flying tackles at the boys and still grooms the girl. They are all neutered. It is bizarre but that's how it goes.

Ha ha, she sounds great!

We had the same thing with mummy and her kitten she used to hiss and bat him away but started earlier than yours.
I read it was natural as they don't tend to stay together and it's mums way of telling them it's time to go and flee the nest almost! Not nice to see though. I hope it gets better for you all.

That’s what I’m thinking - that maybe a mum and kitten isn’t the best combination. Maybe as he gets older it’ll get better…? I guess he’s kind of a teenager right now.

As mother of a 16 year old human kitten I can entirely sympathise, although current social mores tend to discourage swatting.

I have two cats who are sisters from the same litter. They are now middle aged, but will still have a hissing, growling, rolling-around- on the floor fight every few days. The rest of the time they're asleep on my bed, sometimes cuddled up, sometimes maintaining a diplomatic distance.

1. He is neutered, isn't he?
2. He's a teenaged male cat. They are dickheads.
3. She's an adult female cat. They hate dickhead teenaged male cats.
4. He'll eventually become an adult male cat.
5. Adult female cats have long memories where dickhead teenaged male cats are concerned. Especially when the balance of power changes and they're aware that the little dickhead is now bigger and stronger than they used to me.
6. Eventually they get the hang of relatively peaceful coexistence. But the female cats never forget that there is a little dickhead lurking underneath the surface.

lol, yea my DH says he’s a dickhead. The kitten, that is.

He is neutered.

I also wonder if mummy cat has generally taken against male cats because 2 of them made her pregnant, and she had 2 litters of kittens before she was spayed and we adopted her. Maybe she remembers what male cats are capable of and doesn’t fancy going through that again. I wouldn’t blame her!

We had a family group of long-term foster cats. Mum cat and her two sons, all long since neutered. She was in her teens and they were about ten years old, and she thoroughly disliked them. She'd get really cross and hiss & biff them round the head if they went anywhere near her.

Maybe it is nature's way of preventing male mammal offspring from inbreeding with female relatives. They get turfed out in adolescence and sent away to start their own families. Neutering doesn't seem to affect that contempt!!

Apart from the agression and pain that's caused during the mating, so no male cat has ever been nice to her, it's the explosive bursts of energy, the tendency to go from a perfectly nice sniffing of the top of the head or side of the face to a full body tackle or teeth around the neck, the instinct to pester the hell out of her, get carried away with the mating instinct (even if the nads have been removed, they still know at some level) and jump on her back, the noise, the smells, the untrustworthiness where she can never just relax...

Unless you use bleach in your house. Then it's because he's absolutely hyped up on a lovely sexy lady cat smell whenever you've cleaned the toilet and he's a double dickhead.

Cats tend to chase their kittens away once they are grown up.

It's natural as she instinctively won't want to breed with her son. (Neutering doesn't take away basic instincts).

You might find they never get on well together but if you leave doors open so each cat can hang out in a room on their own, they'll probably tolerate each other if they can avoid each other most of the time.

Definitely have a least 2 feeding areas and water stations in different rooms so they aren't competing.

Finally, if you haven't already, try a couple of Feliway Deffusers in your house.

Biffing is an excellent word, and that’s exactly what she’s doing. Poor baby cat, he just wants some attention.

I wish she would stop with the overgrooming though - I’m actually finding it quite distressing because she’s so unsettled all the time. She’s basically not stopped grooming all morning :-(

Bleach?! Didn’t know that! Will avoid.

Eh? Animals don't think like that. Neutered male cats do not pester females at all, even if they come into season, because they no longer have the essential equipment. Toms are only interested when a queen is in season, and at that stage she would be actively seeking out male company and wanting to mate anyway.

The problem here is that he's young, boisterous and wants to play fight, and she's sick of the sight of the annoying twat him.

Do you have separate litter trays, separate sleeping areas, and somewhere she can use as a bolthole to get away from him whenever she wants to? She will also have an established outdoor territory, and he's probably muscling in on that as well, because it is a safe space for him. Can you let them outside at different times of day?

Another thing to do would be to spend a lot of time (far more than you actually want to) in playing with him.

Her overgrooming is a stress response. Of course, the more she does it, the more her skin will become sore and the more she will groom. It's a vicious circle that needs to be broken somehow.

I'm assuming they are both neutered.

In my 60 years of cat ownership, I have never known bleach to have any effect on temperament. It is as toxic to them as it is to us, so keep them away from anywhere you are using it.

They do like the chlorine/ bleach smell though- mine go mad around my swimming things when I come back from the pool. Both neutered females though, so I don't think it's a sex thing!

I've never had a successful boy/girl pairing. The boys seem to want constant companionship and attention, and the girls tend to want to be off alone and only interact on their own terms.

I adopted two girls, one each from different shelters, but there was a mix up and one turned out to be a boy. Constant issues due to the above, she wanted to be alone and he wanted to play so she'd get stressed and overgrown and attack him.

I got a second little boy and that fixed things - they boys played together / slept together and she could join in when she wanted and be left alone the rest of the time.

When they were 11 the second boy died and issues started to crop back up again. I have to keep the boy with me most of the time so he'll leave her alone, and carve out 1 to 1 time with the girl in the evening.

I’d be very happy to get another boy, but if it backfired that would be awful. Something to think about though. We’d vaguely thought about getting another couple of cats when these were settled in, because there are so many rescues needing homes, but with the issues between these too it didn’t seem sensible. But maybe it’s the solution?

They do. It's never been the young neutered females that have landed on the back of another female in their squabbles, it's the males. And pestering isn't just related to sexual behaviour, it's what they do as a personality trait, wanting interaction rather than leaving the other cats alone.

Female cats used to aggressively groom the kids' heads when they came back from swimming and go a bit soppy, the male cats were more affected - if I'd just done a bucket of Milton, they would come over all necessary, want to sniff, lick and bite my hands and when I used actual bleach (which was preferable to disinfectants that are incredibly poisonous to cats), there was a good chance that there would be a proper scrap or crashing sounds from halfway up a set of shelves or behind the telly within about twenty minutes.

No bleach needed to be consumed for the smell to mimic the pheromones and have those effects.

I had a mum and daughter combination from a rescue centre and it did not end well. The aggression from the mother to the daughter was awful and so upsetting that ultimately we had to re-home the daughter. The mother was very stressed by the living situation and constantly having stressed induced cystitis and urinating blood. It was just so awful.

I have since heard that it is very common for mother cats to turn against their off-spring as they mature.

Oh those poor cats @ScaredButUnavoidable. You must have been so sad to have to rehome one, even if it was ultimately better for them both.

since we got the cats Facebook is bombarding me with rescue cats needing homes, but I just don’t know if we can risk adding more, much as I’d like to.

A bit different but I’ve got two females. One is 12 and the other 2 and they do fight a bit even though little one has been with us since 10 weeks old. They tolerate each other a bit more now but I worry the little one is psychologically ruined by the older one lol

I fostered a 5-year-old mum cat & her son for just over 3 months. He was the only one of her kittens that hasn’t yet found a home.

She occasionally played with him or groomed him but mainly stayed well out of the way, in the high places he couldn’t reach yet.

On the day he was rehomed, I came back in and she quite honestly winked at me. She came right out of her shell at that point & I adopted her 3 days later.

It’s pretty normal for cats to want rid of their kittens once they’re weaned, unfortunately.

Did you get them from a rescue @Hotandbothered222? I wonder if you could call them and explain what's happening and see what they suggest? See if they think another young male cat might be a good idea? I can certainly see the logic!