How to minimise your cat wandering too far from the cat-flap

Wandering cat. Image: SVEN HERSELMAN.

I can think of two ways to minimise the distance that your domestic cat companion travels away from your home if they are indoor/outdoor cats. These are my tips:

1. Feed your cat well with high quality wet cat food and some dry cat food for grazing at night. It has been found and indeed suggested by a very well-known cat behaviourist, Dr. Jon Bradshaw, that when domestic cats are fed well and regularly, they have less inclination to patrol over large areas. Domestic cat will inherently patrol their territory if they are allowed outside because this is instinctive wild cat behaviour. But when well fed it dampens that desire. It shrinks their home range because one reason for having a home range is to have a territory within which they can hunt. The hunting desire is somewhat dampened when well fed although not eliminated because the desire to hunt is not directly linked to feeling hungry. This is also inherited from the wildcat ancestor.
2. Secondly, among the wild cat species of all kinds, you will find that the female's home range is considerably smaller than the male's. In fact, for the tiger, female home ranges are often encompassed by a single male home range. It's a kind of male harem. But the point is this: adopting a female cat should mean that they travel less distance from the cat flap.

RELATED: The misogynistic world of tiger property rights!

The above two points have, clearly, distinct advantages to the cat caregiver such as:

• Less desire to hunt native species which should please conservationists and indeed the owner.
• Less desire to roam widely. They might roam no more than 50 yards from the cat flap or even stay within the back yard.
• Improved relationships with neighbours potentially because there will be less desire to roam onto neighbours' backyards or back gardens.
• Less risk of injury through wandering onto roads and being hit by vehicles.
• Less risk of injury generally as there is less opportunity to encounter hazards.
• Less risk of being lost.

Help! 5-year-old black cat sibling marking all over the house. Possible reasons.

 This is the Reddit.com post supporting the title. What to do?

He has 3000 sq ft of house and attic to roam and play. Has a brother from same litter and both are very socialized. They sleep w us every night in our bed. He has a massive outdoor catio jungle in my backyard (50ft x 80 ft) with a 100ft tunnel that runs under Palms and leads to his lizard hunting paradise. 3 litter boxes scattered throughout the house that are always clean w fresh litter. I’ve tried just about everything… still always cleaning up cat piss from walls, carpets, couch. It’s a nightmare 😱 need advice??!!

My answer would be three possibilities on the basis that the cat has been neutered which is the default situation.

The picture is here to illustrate the page only. This is not the cat in question. Image in the public domain.

Clearly, if the cat is not neutered then there is a much higher chance that they will mark territory. But as mentioned on the presumption that the cat is neutered one possible reason is that the brothers no longer get along. 

Siblings become independent

This may well happen because when siblings in the wild grow up they become independent. They leave the natal home range and go in search of their own home range. Their sibling then becomes just another individual occupying their territory. They are independent cats. They are solitary, essentially. The fact that they are siblings no longer helps to ensure that they get along.

So, this particular individual might feel stressed by the presence of his sibling and is marking territory to send a message to his brother that this is his home range and he is unwanted. Marking territory helps to calm him down because he creates his little home which smells like him.

Although siblings can get along it is not a certainty. The idea that adopting two siblings automatically gives you two cats who will keep each company and get along all their lives is a fallacy.

Separation anxiety?

Another possibility is that the owner is not around enough which is creating separation anxiety in one cat. This is happening despite the fact that the person has created a very nice cat environment with lots of things to do and to stimulate them mentally. That is irrelevant in terms of the particular problem clearly otherwise the problem would not exist.

Medical

A third possibility is that the cat who is said to be spraying is not actually spraying urine but is depositing small spots of bloody urine around the home due to cystitis. This is also heavily linked to stress. Dry cat food may exacerbate the problem.

These are three possibilities. When a cat is spraying inside the home it is invariably to do with a mental issue triggered by stress of some sort. That needs to be addressed. The source of stress needs to be found, isolated and then removed.

For cats, cat cafés are like an innocent human being banged up in prison and beaten up

Ben the Vet on TikTok has an interesting take on cat cafés. He thinks they are unsuitable for cats. He seems to disagree with the entire concept. I think he'd get rid of them if he had the power to do so. The point he is making is that in cat cafés, a rather large number of cats are confined to a rather small space and this creates pressure on them territorially.

At a fundamental level domestic cats have the character of the African wildcat which is solitary. Domestic cats have learned to be social creatures over the nine thousand years of domestication but their solitariness is ever present and beyond a certain point being confined with many other cats can put too much pressure on some of them.

They become stressed and a fight can break out as seen in the video. This is why I disagree with multi-cat homes. Normally people who want to own many cats and keep then locked in their home are pretty insensitive to their cats' needs.

RELATED: Are cat cafés ethical?

For me they are ego-centric. They want a lot of cats for personal reasons. How the cats feel is secondary. It should be the other way around.

I think Ben has exaggerated the problem a bit with his analogy but it's an interesting one and it got me thinking which is why, I think, he said it.

And he mentions cystitis being caused exclusively by stress. He's suggesting that cats in cat cafes are going to be predisposed to contracting cystitis. And possibly get a bite and cat bites can be serious because of the bacterial infection injected under the skin. They wound will need to be washed out and the puss removed and the cat put on a course of antibiotics.

Squabbling cats at a cat cafe. Screenshot.

Classic stand-off between resident cat and invading cat

This is a classic stand-off between a resident cat, the orange cat that you see in the video, and an invading cat which is the grey-and-white cat. The resident cat wins the stand-off. It's entirely classic and normal and the intention is to avoid a fight which would harm both of them. Common sense dictates that they don't want to be harmed if it can be avoided. 

Apparently these two meet frequently like this and on every occasion the resident ginger wins the argument. This is probably because he is the resident cat. It's his territory and the grey-and-white knows it. If the roles were reversed I would expect the grey-and-white to win the argument. 

Although, of course, you get cats who are inherently more dominant and those that are inherently more submissive in the same way you get cats that are more confident and those that are more timid. This would be a factor in who wins this kind of stand-off argument.

Note: This is a video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

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ASSOCIATED: Cat ear positions.

You can hear this strange yowling sound which has bemused people in the past but thanks to the Internet it is now understood. It's just a close-range sound to intimidate the other. You'll note that the ears are pulled back slightly. They are not pulled all the way back to fully protect them. I think this is because they probably both knew that they were not going to physically fight because of the fact that they've met before under similar circumstances and know the outcome.

ASSOCIATED: Do domestic cats fight to the death?

The video was made in the town of Gudauta in the Republic of Abkhazia, Georgia. She must have sent the video into the Daily Mail newspaper who pay for videos. It was made by student Salima Sanguliya, 20, who is the caregiver of the ginger cat, Simon.

She gets very close to the cats at one time which I think was unwise because there was lots of aggression on display and one of them might have redirected it against her.

Do cat siblings get along?

Do cat siblings get along? It is an important question. On the face of it, if a person adopts two siblings from the same litter when they first adopt a cat they give each cat an instant companion for life. This can take a load of responsibilities away from the cats' owner because they can entertain themselves. 

Domestic cats are social creatures despite what you read on the Internet about them being independent and solitary. Over 10,000 years of evolution in domestication they had developed into far more social creatures which means they need companionship which in turn means that their human guardian should be around. Sometimes they can't be around because of work commitments which is when a cat companion steps up to the plate.

Lykoi cat siblings. Photo: Brittney Gobble.

So the question as to whether cat siblings get along can be vitally important. And the answer is yes and no. When they are kittens and sub-adults they do get along. They entertain each other and play-fight with each other. The world is perfect if they are in the right home. But when they grow up and become individuals with better developed characters they can start to dislike each other. They may be incompatible. The relationship cools and they drift apart. Sounds familiar?

I do not have statistics on the percentage of siblings who are compatible or incompatible. But there is quite a good chance that they will be incompatible so you can't bank on adopting siblings in the expectation that they will get along for the rest of their lives. This means the policy of a double adoption of kittens from a shelter might not work.

That does not mean you can't adopt two rescue cats from a shelter who are adults. In fact there is an advantage to adopting two adult cats that need to get along because you know that they get along. The shelter staff will be able to assess this and tell you. The cats have been tried and tested. Their characters have matured so if they do get along it will likely be permanent.

I remember when I adopted my cat from an animal rescue centre, the organiser told me that cat siblings do not get along. She must have had a bad experience in adopting siblings herself. Or she had noticed that within the shelter siblings were fighting. She was partly right. Sometimes they don't, as mentioned, but they might and they often do. It's down to personalities.

But once they become adults they like to establish their home range. In the wild when kittens become adults and leave the natal nest they go out into the big wide world and establish their home range i.e. their territory. They want their piece of landscape and if they are in a home together they might be fighting over that territory. Or they might fight over some of the assets such as food and the litter tray.

And if they are incompatible they may urinate inappropriately, they may defecate inappropriately or they may spray urine and finally they may scratch furniture and walls to mark territory. So it will be a bad scene despite best intentions.

I think that the only surefire way of knowing if two cats will get along is by trying it out. That's why I think cat shelters should allow adopters to take a cat back to their home where there is a resident cat for a week to see what happens. They should be open to the possibility of the cat being returned. That should be part of the contract. It may be possible in some cat shelters. I don't know of any other way to deal with this very difficult question of multi-cat homes. Perhaps I'm being too negative because I know their are some very successful homes in which there are several cats.

And when you think about it in this instance domestic gas are being no different to human beings. How many dysfunctional families do you know? How many human siblings do you know who fight with each other because who dislike each other? It is very common for human siblings not to get on.

I myself don't get on very well with my brother and I never got along with my late sister. We were quite different characters. Hell, I didn't even get on with my parents that well either.

It Took a Ginger Cat 3 Weeks To Return to His Former Home Across Town

The moral of this tale is to bear in mind the wishes of your domestic cat companion if and when you decide to move home if, of course, you have a choice about moving.

If you wish to move home out of a preference then your cat will disagree with you judging by the stories that we read on the Internet and this one is a particularly good example. The story concerns a 2-year-old orange tabby cat and he was very used to his home in the St Johns' area of Portland, Oregon, USA.

The family moved across the town to East Portland. This was 12 miles away from their previous home.

Their tabby cat, whose name by the way is George, pretty well immediately set off to return to the place he knew. The only difficulty was that it was, as I say, 12 miles away and and it is known that there are coyotes in the area plus there were 3 interstate highways and I am sure many other roads in between where he was and where he wanted to be.

George made it but it took him 3 weeks and he lost a bit of weight on the way.  When it got there he appears to have been met by the people who rented the property perhaps from George's owners, the Champion family.  I presume they contacted their landlord, the Champions who collected him.

I think he's very impressive. He is now under house arrest and he won't be let out of the home unless he is on a leash. 

It just tells us how very connected the domestic cat is to his territory.  I think the connection between the domestic cat and the place he lives is stronger than the connection between people in the place they live.  A cat's territory is part of him.  It is a part of what he is. In the wild, cats patrol it incessantly and defend it from intruders and we know that unneutered domestic cats do exactly the same thing.

George preferred to live in his territory rather than with his human caretakers. I think that is significant.

There is a black-and-white unaltered (whole in that he has his reproductive organs) cat who patrols his territory and my home is within his territory so whenever he meets my cat who comes out with me into the garden we have the makings of an intense fight unless I intervene.  We are intruders on his patch.