Total Cat Mojo

by Jackson Galaxy

  Segregated Mealtime: Set up dinner plates—one for the newcomer, one for the resident—at an equal and respectful distance from your “feeding door.”

  When choosing a door on either side of which they’ll feed, you always want to make sure that you have ample distance available on both sides of that door—realizing that, at first, your cats might not be comfortable with any less than a six-foot distance from the door. In other words, if you’re doing it at a doorway that leads down to your basement, and one of the cats has to eat on the stairs, that is probably not the best space. (Using the base camp door as your main feeding door is usually the best way to do it.)

  As for the “respectful distance,” that’s basically defined as the minimal distance each of the cats need to be from the door in order to walk up to the dish, eat, and walk away without feeling the need to look around, run up to and bat the door, or swat, hiss, or engage in any other shenanigans that occur when cats are stressed out. This distance, at least initially, becomes the sweet spot at which each cat is aware of, but not threatened or distracted by, the other one.When your cats are introduced to each other via this “remote handshake,” they smell food every time they meet. And the only time they smell food, they’re engaged in that handshake. This is what building positive associations is all about: other cat = food = good.

  Look at it this way: if twenty bucks fell from the sky every time you met a stranger and were trying to size him or her up, you’d probably take it as a sign that the universe wanted you to like this person. In the same way, you are using a cat’s hunger as your main source of leverage.

  Work the Challenge Line: Once you’ve identified that “safe” distance, it essentially becomes your cat’s Challenge Line. From there, every meal becomes a step of one paw over the line—by getting each plate incrementally closer to the door, and thus closing the distance between both diners, the cats get increasingly comfortable with one another . . . all while they are enjoying their food.

  If you’ve moved the bowls closer and you see that one or both cats stare at the door, start to flick or wag their tail, and show irritability, you are likely on the wrong side of the Challenge Line, and your cat will just decide that dinner is more trouble than it’s worth. If this happens, move the food back and find that sweet spot again. (I recommend using painter’s tape to mark that spot on both sides of the door. Defining that Challenge Line visually is actually a great way of marking your cat’s progress, and yours.)

  The goal is to get as close to that closed door as possible, with the same predictable result each time. Don’t move that Challenge Line until you get total compliance; there must be no shenanigans whatsoever. Once you’ve had two or three meals where there’s no response at all, it’s time to move the line closer. But don’t get overzealous and move your line so much that someone freaks and sends you back to square one. Slow and steady definitely wins the race on this one.

  Once you get to the point where the cats are eating every meal about a foot away from either side of the door and walking away without issue, then it’s time for the next phase: allowing visual access.

  CONCURRENT TO YOUR “Other Side of the Door” feeding ritual, these scent-driven, Mojo-building protocols should also be followed:

  Step Four: Scent Swapping

  This is another way of getting one cat’s scent in front of the other in the most nonthreatening way possible. It’s as simple as it sounds.

  “Gift” for the Resident: You will take a “scent soaker” from the newcomer’s base camp—a blanket, soft fabric toy (that most easily retains her scent), or even something like a doughnut bed—and temporarily place it near the resident cat for his inspection. (You can also gently rub a clean sock or washcloth around the face of the new cat to pick up scent that way, then use it as a “scent soaker,” provided that she doesn’t mind you doing that.)

  “Gift” for the Newcomer: You will take a scent soaker from the resident cat and place it near the newcomer. In both cases, the key is not to force her to smell the item, but to let her explore it at her own pace. And don’t worry, she will get to it, and it will accelerate the initiation process. Think of scent swapping as another type of remote handshake.

  Signposts: Here is yet another Catification concept that can be utilized to help with the introduction process. In this case, you would take a more significant item from the new cat’s base camp (like a cat tree) and place it out in the living room, in a major window. This allows your resident to mark the base camp piece with his own scent, establishing a peaceful co-signpost in the home.

  Hint: You can up the ante by providing a scent-soaking double whammy—place one of your “gifts” on one of the signposts!

  Step Five: Site Swapping

  Once your new cat demonstrates mastery of (and Mojo in) base camp, it’s time for the next step: Site Swapping. How will you know she’s mastered base camp? She will appear to be 100 percent comfortable, sitting at the window watching birds and not army-crawling, hiding under things, or jumping every time the door’s opened. And then there are the most obvious signs: when she’s sitting right by the door, trying to dash past you every time you open it, or when you hear her scratching/vocalizing on the other side of the door.

  Site Swapping allows each cat to explore the other’s territory without ever laying eyes on each other. This is also an opportunity for key signposts—like cat trees, litterboxes, etc.—to take on a shared scent.

  You Site Swap on alternating days so no one owns too much land. But you also site swap because if a cat is locked up all day, his energy can build up into a potential “cat bomb.” Here’s how it would unfold:

  Carry the newcomer out of her base camp, put her in the bathroom, and shut the door.

  Allow the resident cat to walk into the newcomer’s base camp, then shut that door.

  Allow the newcomer to explore the rest of the home.

  Rinse and repeat.

  From there, it’s just a matter of them having quality time in each other’s environments. I wouldn’t put a timer on it.

  Make sure that you’re swapping back at predictable times during the day, so you’re not asking your existing cat to be in a closed space for extended periods or asking the newcomer to sleep around the rest of the house all night long, right off the bat.

  Hopefully, this process allows cats to get to know one another really well before they ever see each other, which happens next.

  Cat Daddy Tip

  When it comes to site swapping, there are no hard and fast rules about when and how often, as long as you are consistent. You don’t want to swap randomly, and you don’t want to allow anyone to get too comfortable in one space. You can swap once a day, every other day, or even two or three times a day if the cats are happy. Just don’t let yourself fall into a rut.

  Step Six: Visual Access

  With both cats now acutely aware of the other’s scent, it’s time to let the cats actually see other. The work that you’ve done up to this point has resulted in predictable behavior between the two cats and a cordial (or, at least tolerant) “scent handshake” at every meal. It’s a mistake, though, to assume that they will be just as cordial once the visual element is introduced. Instead, begin at the beginning and reset the Challenge Line; take the feeding line back all the way to where they can see one another and eat with little or no disruption. And now, do the process all over again.

  But first, you have a choice to make. Do you simply crack the base camp door, or set up a pet gate or screen door?

  Option One: It’s often fine to just crack the door. You can grab a couple of those triangular rubber door stoppers from any hardware store and place one either side of the door (to guarantee that no one’s going to swing that door open). Or a hook-and-eye door latch also works just fine to keep the door slightly ajar. There should be only enough space that if some kind of swatting
or swiping breaks out, it can happen with no damage done.

  Option Two: In my experience, the better option is to introduce the cats by either using a pet gate or a screen door. A pet gate works better than a baby gate because pet gates are high and have a walk-through door in them, so that the human doesn’t have to disassemble the base camp door every time he wants to cross that threshold.

  Raising the Curtain

  Once you’ve decided on whether to use a pet gate or screen door, drape a blanket over that gate or use clothespins to hang it from the screen. This gives you a much greater sense of control over the degree of visual access because you can “raise the curtain” gradually over a period of time. The curtain allows you to start with the absolute bare minimum of visual access. For many cats, this added layer of security makes all the difference in giving them the confidence they need to take that next paw over their Challenge Line.

  The “Screening” Process

  As you’ve seen on my show, I prefer to install a screen door at the base camp door. That sounds like a very big undertaking, but in reality, it’s not. The costs of a screen door with sturdy pet screening, and the elbow grease to install it by taking your door off the hinges and putting this door in, are fairly minimal. And you can even do it in a rental apartment. I highly recommend going with a screen door because it allows for control of access in a way that nothing else can. There are no gates to jump over, no doorstops to budge out of the way, and no worry about how high the crack might be under the door.

  Cat Daddy Tips

  Whichever method you use to introduce visual access, the following tips will help:

  With some cats, you might have to start with no visual access, and then move them into each other’s sight line slowly. (The blanket technique works well for this.) This then becomes the first Challenge Line to cross—moving from “I know you’re there but can’t see you,” to actually eating while in the sight line of the other.

  Oftentimes a glitch occurs when one cat eats like a vacuum cleaner while the other picks, pecks, and walks away. You can use a slow down bowl or other food puzzle to buy you more time on the vacuum cleaner’s side, while making sure not to provide too many treats between meals and choosing “Jackpot!” food for dinner for the finicky diner.

  When you just crack that base camp door, even if you maximize the angle so the cats are almost looking at each other, it still has a hunting game vibe to it, because each cat gets only glimpses of the other cat. With the screen door, there is no question about the message: all body language is obvious.

  I’ve seen this process take weeks. But I’ve also seen this process take just a few days. Your cats will tell you when they’re comfortable. Knowing what your cat’s body looks like on the side of comfort and on the side of challenge really tells you everything you need to know moving forward.

  Once you get to the point where you’ve raised the curtain completely, allowing total visual access while the cats are eating fairly closely to each other (remember, it’s not reasonable to expect two stranger cats to comfortably eat within six inches of each other, even if there’s a door separating them, but you get as close as you can), then you’re ready for our next step.

  Step Seven: Eat Play Love

  I’m a huge hockey fan. The game has changed tremendously since I was a kid back in the ’70s. To put it mildly, hockey was a superdangerous sport back then—and not just because you were playing at very high speeds on a sheet of ice with 1/8” wide metal blades, holding a wooden stick and dodging a solid rubber projectile traveling sometimes in excess of 100 mph. No, back then, the real danger was that the players would not hesitate to beat the crap out of each other once they were engaged in the game. Sure, fighting is still a fairly common part of the game today. But back then, in a way, it was the game.

  With inevitable violence looming once the whistle sounded, I always thought the most fascinating thing was the pregame ritual, when both teams would skate out onto the ice for their warm-up period. Each team would occupy an opposite side of the rink, with the red line dividing the ice right down the middle. The players would skate in circles, warming up their legs and taking shots at their goalie. And they would occasionally glance over at their opponents at the other side of the rink, who were also skating in circles and warming up. Sworn enemies, engaged in the same activity, separated by a painted line. What kept these continual circles moving while this unspoken frenetic energy, boiling beneath the surface, dictated that, at any moment, a staredown would lead to a full-scale throwdown? The fragile peace was kept by virtue of the ritual itself; the players knew that “this is the way it always happens—and it never has or will result in a brawl.”

  This is the vision I had in mind when designing the next step of introduction, which I call Eat Play Love (EPL). Philosophically, this is an extension of the “other side of the door” exercise. Before, you were just creating a positive association based on food. Now you are going for the whole enchilada. These three things—eat, play, and love—represent the highest of high-value experiences we humans bring to our cats in the course of a day. When this exercise is in play (no pun intended!), all of these experiences are withheld until they can be broken out as one big feel-good extravaganza. (To the best of our abilities, of course. You can’t just go on a snuggle strike—that would be ridiculous!) I’m serious—this ritual has the potential to be Christmas morning every day, and the one caveat is that it happens with a strange cat in the room.

  The gist of EPL is pretty simple: You’re bringing one cat into a room where there’s another cat at the other end of the “rink,” so to speak, who is already engaged in a high-value, fully engrossing activity. And your challenge is to keep them “skating” in their own circle for as long as possible through treats, positive reinforcement, play, and . . . well . . . love—without that staredown/throwdown happening.

  Fire Drill

  The earliest I remember the “Fire Drill” was 1973. I was six years old, which would make my brother two or three. We lived in an apartment in New York City, something that made my dad ultraparanoid when it came to emergencies, since you were, to a degree, held hostage by the building itself. So, with getting out of the building being the thing that would keep us alive, he made sure we knew the exact steps that would get us out, and also the exact and graphic consequences if we didn’t follow those steps. Believe me, he had us motivated.

  Of course, he had to take it a step further. That’s where the fire drill came in. In the middle of the night, dad would suddenly come running into our bedroom, turn on the lights, and, while banging on a pan with a wooden spoon, yell, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  My brother and I, after first soiling our pj’s, would go into full-on fire drill mode. The first couple of times, you’re half hysterical and fully dazed, struggling to recall the protocol. But after three or four times, the banging, the lights flicking on and off, and his booming voice became an association: get on the floor. Both of us lying flat, my brother would get on my back. I would turn into a turtle and crawl to our bedroom door and put my hand on the doorknob to see if it was hot. If not, we kept turtle crawling, staying low. We did that with every closed door in the apartment until we got to the front door and felt it. If it wasn’t hot, we would head outside, being sure to use only the stairs—never the elevator. We would then head out into the lobby of the building, steps from emerging onto freaking Broadway at three in the morning. And there’s your fire drill.

  That was nearly forty-five years ago at the time of this writing, and I remember that fire drill in my bones. It’s muscle memory. To this day, if someone came running into my bedroom banging a wooden spoon on a pot in the middle of the night yelling “fire,” I would get out of that house in a very safe way. Then I might come to my senses and have the crazy person who got into my house arrested, but that’s not the point. The point is that staying prepared so that anxiety is put on the back burner while a job gets done
. . . that’s the fire drill.

  This is a great concept to apply to many “cat parenting” functions like giving your cat a pill or helping him into a carrier (which we’ll get into in chapter 12). For now, though, how does this concept apply to our present circumstances? “Fire drill” in terms of your cats in a multicat household is having walked though every eventuality in such a complete way that you will metaphorically get your ass onto Broadway.

  The bridge that is crossed when moving from introduction (or reintroduction) techniques to one where we balance technique with a degree of trust is a crucial part of the journey. That said, the bridge doesn’t have to feel like it’s going to give way at any moment. The following checklist helps keep the cats safe during the process, but, just as important, keeps you feeling in control—which is just as important as the steps themselves. Our cats are so energetically sensitive, and are already feeling the raised temperature in the room. Your sense of unease, the pervading “What if . . . ?” thinking from moment to moment, can very well be the spark that sets the bridge on fire.

  Therefore, it’s important for you to break down and anticipate the possibility of conflict. That way, when you’re finally at that point—with the cats in the same room together, barrier-free—you will know what to do if conflict begins to unfold and the fire alarm sounds.

  The Eat Play Love Checklist

  The Unders and the Outs—When we lose control of exercises like EPL, many times we lose it to the environment itself. One thing I can tell you from experience—fights start with chasing. Chasing very often ends in a room, in a closet, or under a bed or a piece of furniture you never in your wildest nightmares thought was big enough for one cat, let alone two. You can control the chaos by controlling the space—and that means blocking off the Unders and sealing off the Outs. If your EPL session takes place in the living room, then it’s up to you to seal off the Outs—meaning doors are closed, gates are up, and you are now working in a playing field that you alone have defined. Further define that space and block off the Unders. The only way to make sure you’re not going to put your hand into a “trash disposal” of fangs and claws is to make sure there’s not going to be a fight under a bed or couch!