Letters to the Editor
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Cat is bad because he is a cat?
A lot of the behavior the LW is writing about is pretty standard behavior for a lot of cats I know. Depending on the individual, cats can be extremely territorial (which is why he views anyone entering the appartment as an intruder), getting into things that you don't want them too and generally being a pain to deal with. To deal with the more extreme behavior, you need to get a behavior specialist involved who will teach you how to deal with these less than charming traits and manage his worst behaviors.
I own a cat myself and as much as I love her and think that she is a pretty well behaved animal she does do some very similar things, though not to as great a degree. She views anyone that is not one of her people as a threat and will either hiss and snarl or hide. When my neice and nephew were infants, she saw them as another animal invading her territory and would jump onto a chair so she could hit them in the head. To this day, she still doesn't accept them. We tried to bring a kitten into the house, thinking that she might want the companionship. After a week we gave up because in between bouts of attacking the kitten she would perch on a shelf in the kitchen and hiss at anyone who came near her - we gave up trying to force the issue because she stopped eating. If I leave my cabinet open by even a tiny amount, she will push her way in and sleep on my clothes, which means everything will be covered in cat hair. There is no such thing as sleeping in on the weekends because she insists on me waking up to feed her breakfast at the crack of dawn, and throwing her out of my bedroom winds up with her sitting outside my door whining. One night after we put up fresh wallpaper, I came in to find her spider climbing the wall! And we've finally gotten vet appointments to be merely unpleasent and not torture for everyone involved.
These are normal behaviors. The trick is knowing how to deal with them. Getting a specialist in cat behavior involved will go a long way towards getting Oliver back towards acceptable behavior.
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micro
wave
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21st Century Cat Toy
Molly Picon advised: 'I just thought of a piece of advice- have you tried exercising your cat with a cat dancer or laser toy?'
Excellent suggestion there from Molly. The LW said the cat couldn't be bothered with the standard fake mice & furry balls & plastic BS that goes for cat toys these days.
I own 3 cats myself & I'm telling you I can run em up a wall chasing after the ole laser pointer. It gets to the point where I have to stop (thinking I'm going to stroke one out). This kind of high-excitement chasing can get the aggression out & tire him out so much all he wants to do is get a drink of water & sleep for 10 hours.
Good luck to the LW. I have never owned an angry cat myself (hope I never do). My relatives have had them & they just basically lived & tolerated the animal until it died.
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Throw the dice
Put it in a crate and drive it out in the middle of nowhere. Sounds like the cat is just evil enough to survive. Because let's face reality 'cats-are-people-too' people. You'd do that if you came home and a squirrel was in your house. So send it back out into the wild. It's basically a wild animal. An-I-Maaaal! Not a person not a baby not even a pet. Maybe it'll make it maybe it won't. Go cry on Chuck Darwin's shoulder.
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Try psychiatric drugs
Dear LW,
There are a number of good psychiatric drugs for cats which, hopefully, can alleviate your cat's problems. Find a good vet and inquire. If your cat won't eat food with the pill or liquid mixed in, then just use an inexpensive pill popper and shoot the pill right down his mouth before meals. We use prozac to treat one of our cat's aggression, and it works very well.
I would get another opinion about the issue of defecating outside of the litter box. Your cat might be constipated or have a urinary tract infection, or a similiar problem, and thus he would associate his litter box with pain and avoid it. Also, if you haven't already, experiment with different kinds of litter, because it might just be a matter of preference.
I know it's hard to go what you're going through, but please don't give up on this little fellow. If you need to isolate him when you have company, so be it. If he knocks stuff over, "cat proof" your house by minimizing the amount of stuff he can access and knock over.
Good luck!
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It's Time to Die
After my wife died, her cat became neurotic and started to do distructive things, almost like it was being defiant. It was not a happy cat. I took he to the vet and had him put to death. I mourned for a couple of hours at the loss and for what I had to do. Then, life became easier and better which was what I needed to have in my life at that time.
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I also raised a day old cat
who is very sweet, and timid rather than aggressive around unfamiliar people. One big difference between my cat's story and yours (and not something you can go back and change, unfortunately) is that I had another cat who served as a means for socialization for the kitten. So while I fed him and cleaned him, the older cat taught him to use the litterbox, groom himself, and play-fought with him a lot (which gives cats a sense of the limits of acceptable aggression... bite too hard or claw too deep and the older cat would set him straight). He has never once shat outside his box, nor attacked a stranger. While getting a kitten to survive is not simple, but is something a human can do, teaching cat behavior is much more complex and probably requires a cat.