Friends that recently moved in with me have 2 cats..I have a cat and 3 dogs..yeah alot of pets now! One dog gets along fine with the new editions. The other 2, both labs, will bolt after the new cats when they venture out of the bedroom. It has been 6 months and I would have thought everyone would be okay by now. How can I stop the dogs from rushing the cats? I have a cat of my own that rubs up against the dogs and walks around without an issue. Does anyone have any ideas?
If it hasn't changed by now it most likely won't..just from experience. I have 3 small dogs, and 4 cats, one is my sisters. One won't come in the living room at all, and one plays great with the dogs, the other two, don't care for them and the dogs chase them out of the room most of the time. Mostly at night is when they do most of their chasing. All my cats are fixed and 1 of my dogs is fixed, don't know if that makes a difference or not. Out of the cats 3 were raised with my dogs, my sisters was raised around big dogs and even had his paw broken by a lab..took him about a month before he would come out here and get on the floor with my small dogs. My dogs don't hurt them, they just I guess don't want to always share the living room, were the dogs are not allowed down the hallway or bedrooms, where the cats are. It's just a give an take thing here lol.
You can change the behavior, but it will take time and patience. Especially now that it's been repeated for 6 months. Success will depend on how trainable your dogs are and how much time you can invest in this ... it can be rather time-consuming at first. When we *ahem* got adopted by a stray kitten, who ended up being very sweet and very interested in becoming a house cat, one of our dogs was fine with that. The other dog, a hound mix, not so much. He spent a lot of time on a leash in the house initially so he could not chase after the kitten, who (thankfully) was not scared of him in the least. We also got a wire basket muzzle for the hound, and he wore that for about a month or so until he chilled out around the kitten and learned how to interact with her in a way that did not involve his open mouth. (It turned out that all he really wanted to do was smell her really thoroughly, but he would get so dramatic about it that I wasn't sure I could trust him to just smell her, you know?) If the hound even thought about going after the kitten, he got a quick leash correction and an "Ehhhnt" sound from me (which means you better stop that RIGHT NOW). He got praised for giving me his attention. (I would ask him to do something he knew, like sit, and tell him what a GOOD BOY he was.) Unfortunately at first it was tough for him, because he does not have good self-control, and kittens being kittens, she was very distracting as she raced around the house batting her toys. (We had already gone through several training classes though, so the building blocks for him understanding the correction and me timing it properly were already there.) But it did get to the point where he would mostly ignore her while leashed, and then we let him have free rein in the room we were in but kept the leash attached to him in case we needed to grab him. It took probably three solid months before I felt comfortable letting him off-leash in the house with her out and about. When she first came, it was all he could do to pay attention to me while she was on the other side of the bedroom door. (She has the spare bedroom to herself, and the dogs know not to go in there unless invited by us. She still stays there at night because she has an affinity for power cords—the plugged-in ones. :? So it is safer for her to be in there when we cannot watch her.) Now they play together and have little fun "chase me" games in the house. She'll go tearing after a toy, he'll trot after her. She'll gallop up behind him and launch herself at his bum and bite whatever is close to her mouth, lol. He will then give me this terrified look and try to gently dislodge her, at which point she goes galloping off in another direction. Crazy animals. :mrgreen:
