Uncle Augie

It's been a month of conflict and uneasy peace since one-year-old Creamy earned his indoor privilege alongside my longtime 8 year old indoor/outdoor cat Augie, and they were both given a cat door (which took about 2 weeks of training to get them to use, first with a fully open flap) to go indoors and outdoors into the fully enclosed back yard at will.  This is a dream for both cats!  Creamy to come in and Augie to freely go out,  and both enjoy the new privilege more than anything.

It has always seemed to me that Augie has been less aggressive, though he has apparently held on mostly to declaring the bedroom areas as his territory.  Creamy claims the living room and kitchen now, though for a brief moment they were both sleeping on the side couch in the living room (which had been my goal, though I allowed alternatives).

There was only one day or so after the beginning (when Creamy had seemed sick from a fight elsewhere and the heat and perhaps neighbor's rotting trash...and I felt sorry enough for him AND he was passive enough not to immediately claim the whole house) when Creamy seem to have lost his top dog status.  Then Augie was using the cat door with attitude instead of trepidation.  But mostly it has been the reverse.

Now today Augie sat on the step, a spot Creamy frequently claims, near the cat door, when Creamy wanted to go out.  This is the kind of thing Creamy would do.  So now Creamy has some trepidation.  But Augie just lies there passively, no threats.  So Creamy ultimately comes out, and there's no fight.

So Augie is showing he's not going to attack, so maybe they can get the cat door territory made common.

It's just one example of many things that seem like Augie is trying to train and enable, along with somewhat deferring to, his his little nephew.

Male cats in many situations are not entirely pugnacious or antagonistic.  The patio itself (more than the cat door) has been well understood to be shared territory from the beginning.  Creamy has only tried to block Augie from going into the house, much as he felt he was blocked from going into the house before (though that was mostly because of me, not Augie...Augie often seemed to set things up by demanding out when Creamy wanted in, so they'd cross paths).

As I've long said, cats that are in want to go out, and cats that are out want to come in.  But the cats have liked to sleep in the house during the 100 plus days, then go out all night.  When it's only in the 90's, they're fine being out in the day too, now sleeping in their shared patio, just two feet apart.

Back before I was taking care of a backyard cat, if I let Augie outside, which he demanded often but I refused a many times of day, he'd immediate escape from my finite back yard and go over the wall and into some neighbors yard.  I wouldn't see him again until I called him back in, sometimes for hours.

Now that he has a fellow cat in the back yard, he rarely goes farther than the patio or it's immediate surroundings.   It's amazing how that has worked.  He has to stick in the patio to defend his partial claim to it from the other cat, and vice versa, and similarly for the other cat, who didn't stick around the patio for long either.

It very much seems like they have some kind of fellowship of some kind.  It's a pugnacious fellowship, but at the end of the night they like to curl up nearby.  At least in the patio.  In the house they rarely stay together long.  I feed them both in the kitchen and Augie is instantly gone after finishing what he wants to eat from his bowl.

It also seems like Augie is in many ways trying to train his little (in age, not so much size anymore) nephew.  I'm worried that perhaps Augie feels like he's in need of replacement soon too.

Augie was somewhat over aggressive for years, and you'd still be better not be trying to pick him up, because he has a strong sense of independence, but he's unaggressive now, and he has always been extremely loving on his own terms, he loves me with endless warmth and purring on one foot or another, at the table sometimes, or more often when I'm sitting down to on the bed to change my shoes (and it's a major inconvenience, but I'm not going to say no) or at on the toilet, or flossing.  Those are the times he chooses for some reason.

Creamy seems to be going through that same over aggressive stage, and Augie seems to be training Creamy to slow down and just let the good life roll.






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