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One of the first articles I wrote as pets blogger here was about how cats and dogs really can get along. I worked hard to make sure that my cat and dog, even if they’d never be fast friends, tolerated each other. I’m happy to say that while Chihiro and Cole don’t cuddle as much as I wish they would, they definitely seem fond of one another. Unfortunately, that’s made me complacent.
It’s easy to forget that pets, like humans, have individual personalities. Just because one dog and one cat get along, that doesn’t mean all will. That’s the hard lesson I learned at the beginning of the month.
My husband and I hosted some friends of ours over a weekend. In addition to their two young children they brought their dog with them for the visit. I spent Friday afternoon before their arrival trying to orchestrate a room into which Cole could escape if all the visitors were too much for him.
I became frustrated after a while as none of my attempts worked. My husband reassured me that everything would turn out fine, and that I didn’t need to stress out. He was right about the latter, but not exactly the former.
Soon after our friends arrived their dog discovered Cole hiding behind the sofa. Cole tried to bolt for the door, and the dog was after him like a shot. This wasn’t the romping playtime in which Cole and Chihiro sometimes engage; my friend’s dog was out for the capture.
I’ve never seen Cole so upset. He literally tried to climb the walls to get away from the dog. He flattened himself against the window above the sink and clawed at it, desperate to get out. Clearly this dog and Cole were not meant even to ignore one another.
We ended up letting Cole stay shut up in our room for the duration of the weekend, despite the fact that for various reasons the pets aren’t allowed upstairs. Cole spent the first night burrowed under the bed; I provided his food and water next to him and his litter box in the corner of the room, but he had no interest in either.
By Saturday afternoon Cole was eager for attention; he required no coaxing to emerge for some petting time, and he even began to eat a little. He was feeling so much back to his normal self that night that he had to be shut up in a spare room downstairs because his cries for attention kept me awake. We’d have kept him in the spare room the whole weekend, but during the day we’d been working at putting hardwood down inside it.
Despite Cole’s violent scare on Friday, he seemed much less shaken by the negative dog encounter than he was by the move; it took him a much shorter time to recover from this incident. What my husband and I have learned from all this is that although some cats and dogs do get along, or even just ignore each other, others don’t.
If we’d planned the meeting between our friends’ dog and Cole, things might have gone better. From observing her over the course of the weekend, we noticed that our friends’ dog has a strong “chase and catch” instinct; if she’d been calmly introduced to Cole with both parties being held by their owners, rather than her first introduction to Cole being watching him try to streak out of the room, she might not have found him less interesting, or at least less fun to chase.
I’ve been lazy, taking my dog’s and cat’s interaction for granted. Sometimes the fur just does fly between these two species, especially if care isn’t taken to introduce them properly.
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