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[quote=Anonymous]I’m looking for some cat behavior advice and I’m hoping someone has an idea that we haven’t thought of yet. We have three cats. A little background: about five years ago, we found some kittens in a bag outside our house that someone tried to drown in a drain. After DH fished them out, we were the proud owners of two kittens and their mama. We were all living happily until about three years ago when we took the mama cat to get her teeth cleaned. From the moment she got home from the vet, she has been in a fight with one of her kittens, who has now grown into a 16-pound beast, twice her size. The fights are absolutely vicious and the mama cat, who is a super sweet little marshmallow, just gets her butt kicked. They take turns being the aggressor.

We have tried “introducing” them like you would a new cat by slowly opening a door between them over a period of weeks. We have tried calming remedies in their water. We have tried those pheromone plug-ins. We tried separating them and then switching their “territories” so they get used to the other’s smell. We have even recently tried giving them anti-anxiety meds that the vet prescribed, but they will not take the meds no matter what we do (we finally managed to get a tiny bit of a pill in mama cat’s mouth and she started foaming at the mouth and threw up three times in a row).

Sometimes they will eat right next to each other, only to get into a brutal fight as soon as they’re done. We now have the mama cat separated in our guest bedroom with her own litter/food/water, but this is not a tenable long-term solution. It’s just not fair for her to live like that, but we don’t know what else to do. We do let her out sometimes when we can supervise and distract them when one of them starts to act aggressive, but it’s not enough. To add to the mix, we recently had a baby and the cat situation is taking over our lives. DH’s family is from another country and wants to come visit us, but no one can stay at our house because the mama cat lives in our guest room.

It seems like our best option is to re-home the mama cat, but we have asked everyone we know and nothing has worked out. I would never be able to live with myself if we put her in a shelter, so does anyone have any advice? I will try almost anything to get them to at least be able to use the same litter box again (the other two cats have litter boxes in our office).
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