Background
We recently purchased a 3 month old female Persian kitten which was born last August.
We already have a one year old male border collie.
Both animals grew with their counterparts in their initial families (the place were they were born). That is : the puppy liked to play with a short aired cat and the kitten liked to sleep with a Bichon.
The problem
My dog is twice as big as the Bichon my cat knew. When my dog sees the kitten, it run after it (but it doesn’t growl or bristles its hair). It also ends up crying if it can’t approach my kitten (either because it watches it through the window of the garden or because my kitten is in a cupboard).
The real problem is the kitten : it is completely terrified of the border collie. It arches its back and constantly tries to escape my dog when it is in the house.
This ends up in one of the following situation :
- The kitten manages to climb a cupboard in order to escape. This makes the border collie cry so much that I need to put it in the garden.
- The dog manages to corner the cat in the house and sit in front of it without touching it (in that case it doesn’t cry), but the kitten is so afraid that it doesn’t try to bit or scratch at the border collie. As result, the dog doesn’t learn it should leave the cat alone.
Both of them can last several hours (the dog doesn’t move an inch). In both cases, my female Persian kitten still has its heart pulsing very very fast after that time.
Result
1 month of confrontation with Feliway® and FeliFriend® seems to have made my cat's fear stronger (at the same time it has no problem with other humans even those it doesn’t know). I don’t try to force their relationship. I leave them alone when they are together.
This is problematic since I expect the cat to hunt the wild birds which eat the fruits of my garden every day next summer.
I have no ideas of what I should do at that point. At least, if my cat ends up having less fear, it could teach the dog to not play with it, so they could avoid each other.