Kitten biting new kitten

Question
Hi Kate hope you can help or reassure me with this question. We have a 15 week old female tortoiseshell kitten, she had been with us three weeks when we acquired an 8 week old male kitten. They have been together for almost three weeks now and since day one the elder female kitten has been very aggressive towards the younger male. She appears to wait for him or goes looking for him, hisses, spits and then corners him, gets him onto his back and bites his neck or any part of his body she can get to. It has got to the point where the younger male has started to run away the minute he sees he older female. Occassionally I have thought it is getting better as she will sometimes groom the younger male but this only lasts for a couple of minutes before the fighting starts again, is it just a case of being patient until the male is large enough to defend himself or should I be really worried about his safety. I have to keep them in seperate rooms when we are not around and it is becoming a real chore! Any thoughts would be much appreciated.


Answer
Hi
well two things are happening here really. firstly your female kitten is still learning about being a cat and with no mother cat around to teach her the boundaries of fighting hunting etc she may be going too far with the male kitten.

She is also asserting her authority on the house and the hissing etc is part of that. normally what happens is that the cats will settle down into their perspective roles and the spats should only be spats occasionally.

Lastly your female cat is maturing and within the next month or so should be spayed. this will also help to calm her down.

Don't worry often cat fights look and sound a lot worse than they are.

best wishes
Kate