Male to Female agression

Question
Help! We are desperate.
We have a 4yr old male. We introduced a female kitten to the household 1 yr ago. We were advised that he would bond better with a female than another male. Lo and behold he has done nothing but torment her the enitre time.
We have kept a close eye on them and keep them separate most of the time. We ended up with a stray which we thought was a female and our male accepted 'her' immediately. Turns out 'she' is a 'he' and he gets along with both cats. However, the agression of our older male has now become worse to our female and it is not play- he sees her and has tunnel vision, he pays no attention to the water bottle which works for everything else. He attacks, she cowers and runs. We find chunks of her fur everywhere and she spends all her time looking around in fear. We usually put in alone in the bathroom for a timeout. He comes out later nice and peaceful.  The latest attack when my fiance picked him up to put him in the bathroom, our cat went beserk and actually bit Ron very badly to the point Ron had to go to the doctor for treatment. We have tried spray pheromones, time outs, srpay bottles, and separating but can't live our lives this way forever. Any Any advice at all would be helpful. We understand we may have to find a home for one of them but would like that to be the last resort?

Answer
Christine,

After a year of this, I am not sure you can cure this "problem".  Unfortunately, the first mistake was separating them at all!!!!!  The two rules of cat inter-relationships is that (1) there should be no human interference and (2) humans tend to not understand the relationships and rules cats have for interacting with each other.  The separation and the punishment has probably created a situation where your 4 year old now associates punishment with the female.  In all probability the relationship between these two cats is poisoned.

The fact that your 4 year old male has attacked your fiance is a very, very bad sign.  My advice at this would be to give the female to someone who has no other cats in their house.  I would expect with her gone, the older male would perceive the threat has having gone and should be much more docile.

Introducing a cat to a household with other pets has to be done a bit more carefully than just throwing them togther (which, by the way, is what most people do).  Sometimes people can get away with throwing cats together and sometimes not.  Whether thay are male or female should have very little bearing on how they relate once they are neutered or spayed.  It is much more how the chemistry of the two cats towards one another will work or not.  Like poeple, cats can take an instant like or dislike to each other no matter how they are introduced.

Good luck and best regards... Norm.