Territorial Behaivour In Cats

Question
Hi There

I hope that you will be the right person to help me as I am at my wits end, I will try and give you all of the relevant background to my problem as it is a behaivoural problem that I have.

Myself and my partner have 4 cats, 2 Bengal Cats (male and female) and 2 Bengal cross breeds (offspring of the female) again male and female.

They all get along fine, however we have had new neighbours move in recently and they own a 12 year old female cat of mixed breed.

At first there was the usual fighting our older Male bengal (a massive cat) had the neighbours cat pinned against the wall, I intervened and brought our cat away, and a couple of days later our Older female (A very very small cat) also had the other cat pinned against the wall, again I intervened as I dont like to see animals in pain.

However recently our female and the neighbours cat have been fighting regularly and it has got to the point where their cat has actually entered our house on 3 occasions and attacked the younger 2 cats and the older female, you can now see that these 3 cats are not comfortable at home any more, conversely our large male does not seem remotely bothered by the whole situation and does not intervene when this happens.

Unfortunately the neighbours cat has learned to enter our house through one of our top windows, so we either have to leave all our cats out, or keep them locked in during the day whilst we are still at work as we dont want this cat entering our cats home, I dont want to get a magnetic catflap as I dont like putting the collars on them, I have ordered a microchip reading catflap, but that will not arrive until late summer.  To compound matters, we are going on holiday later in the summer, and the people we have to look after our cats are the owners of the other cat so now we are pretty sure that we will not be able to relax as we are extremely obsessive about our cats welfare

I was hoping that you could give me an insight into why this is happening, and if there is anything that we can do to stop it?

Any help you can give me would be much appreciated,

Thanks

Craig Cook  

Answer
Craig,

Truthfully, unless you batten down the hatches at home and keep your cats inside, there is nothing you can do.

Generally, the cats do work it out amongst themselves, although it may take many weeks.  Also, as noisy and as gruesome as it might seem, cats rarely hurt each other in these types of altercations.

Cats have very tough skin and tend to play with each other in ways that seem to be fighting to us.  If you ever watched little kittens it is amazing how roughly they play with each other.  

I have two rules about cat inter-relationships: (1) Humans should not interfere and (2) Humans do not understand the rules. So, as difficult as it may seem, the best thing may be to leave it all alone and see what develops.  Eventually things should calm down, although the "fighting", if it is a game, will continue.

Outside of keeping your cats in, or your neighbors keeping their cat in, there is nothing, really, you can do.

Good luck and best regards... Norm.