Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet by Bradshaw John

Author:Bradshaw, John [Bradshaw, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780465040957
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2013-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Owners’ opinions about their cats’ emotional capabilities

The most common cause of anxiety in cats is probably the worry that their territory is likely to be invaded by other cats in the neighborhood, or even by another cat in the same household. When I surveyed ninety cat owners in suburban Hampshire and rural Devon in 2000, they reported that almost half of their cats regularly fought with other cats, and two out of five were fearful of cats in general. My colleague Rachel Casey, a veterinary surgeon specializing in cat behavioral disorders, regularly diagnoses anxiety and fear as the main factors driving cats to urinate and defecate indoors, outside the litter tray. Some cats spray the walls or furniture with urine, possibly to deter other cats from entering their owner’s house believing it to be cat-free; others find the point in the house farthest from the cat-flap and urinate there, seemingly terrified of attracting the attention of any other cat. Some will defecate on the bedsheets, desperately trying to mingle their own odor with their owner’s to establish “ownership” of the core of the house. When the conflict is between two cats that live in the same house, one may spend much of its time hiding, or obsessively groom itself until its coat becomes patchy.21

The stress of being forced to live with cats it does not trust can often be severe enough to affect the cat’s health. One illness now known to be closely linked to psychological stress is cystitis, referred to by veterinarians as idiopathic cystitis because no disease or other medical cause is apparent. As many as two-thirds of cats taken to vets for urination problems—blood in the urine, difficult or painful urination, urinating in inappropriate places—have no obvious medical problems, other than inflammation of the bladder and intermittent blockage of the urethra by mucus thereby displaced from the bladder wall. The factors triggering such episodes of cystitis are therefore psychological, and research has identified conflict with other cats living in the same household as being perhaps the most important of these. Less easy to quantify, but possibly just as important, are conflicts with neighbors’ cats: certainly cats prone to cystitis usually run away from cats they meet in their own gardens, rather than standing up to them, which suggests that they find contact with other cats particularly stressful. Idiopathic cystitis is less common in female cats than in males: the conventional medical explanation is that the tube leading out of the bladder, the urethra, is generally narrower in males and therefore more prone to blockage. However, male cats are generally more territorial and less sociable than females, so the latter may find it easier to resolve or avoid conflicts with other cats before stress affects their health.

Colleagues of mine at Bristol University Veterinarian School documented one case involving a five-year-old male cat that was having great difficulty urinating, and when he did, his urine was bloody. He also groomed his abdomen excessively, but otherwise was entirely healthy. The cat was one of six within the household, but was friendly with none of the other cats.

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