merging cats

Question
I just read a message about this, but my situation is a little different. My boyfriend is moving in with his two cats and I already have a cat. One of his cats and mine are brothers and a little over a year old. The other cat he is bringing is 13 years old and a female. They have been exposed to each other when my boyfriend babysat for me while I was gone a week ... but it was at his house where my cat was born. The female is an old broad who is basically a loner.

His cats are indoor/outdoors cats and one of them has just shown signs of having worms. My cat is an indoor cat. I've talked to my vet about getting worm medicine and they recommended I treat them all so we are in the process of getting the vet records for his cats and setting them up for a visit to my vet. We are looking at joining the two families in the next few days.

My questions are probably pretty obvious, but here goes: how do we reintroduce them to each other so it is as smooth a transition as it can be and as stress-free for all of them as possible; should they be together before the worming meds are complete?

Thanks for your help!

Answer
HI there,

You need to not look at this as a reintroduction, cats have very short memories and will have no idea that they once knew each other or that they are related.  It needs to be a brand new integration.  Worms are easily treated with a couple of doses of medication but do yourself a favor and get a fecal done first, the cats may not need any of the poison used to get rid of them and if they do knowing which worms they have will help the vet use the correct medication to get rid of them.  Fecals are generally inexpensive.  

I would be more worried about the outdoor cats having feline aids or leukemia, the cats should be tested for these diseases before being introduced to your cat, they may seem perfectly healthy but still have the virus and right now these are the top killers of cats.  The test is again, relatively inexpensive considering having either of the virus' is fatal.  If they come back clear I would recommend trying to convince your boyfriend to keep his cats inside from now on or you will need to get your cat vaccinated.  Unfortunately the vaccines for these virus' are very contriversal as to wether or not they even work and how hard they are on the cat but this is a choice you will have to make, I would recommend you do some reading on it and try not to get all of your information from the vaccine makers website ;)

From what I gather the older girl is pretty easy going and is not forseen to be a problem?  So I would have three 'area's' one cat in your bedroom, one in a second bedroom (?) and the older girl in the main area.  Let them stay this way for a few days and then let each seperately have thier time in the main area with the older girl they will start to get the sent of the other cats this way.  Let them sniff at each other under the door and basically follow the advice from the other post from here :)

Good luck!

Natoma