Dogs and Cats Living Together: the Advantage of Height

by Aimee Amodio | More from this Blogger

30 Jan 2009 01:30 PM

Little by little, my dogs and my roommates' cats are getting used to each other. The dogs are mostly polite when the door to the cats' room is open -- they don't bark or whine TOO much, unless I'm in with the cats.

One of my roommates found an online forum for cat lovers, and asked for advice about introducing cats to dogs. She got one piece of advice that I think is really valuable: give the cats the advantage of height.

Think of it this way: the cats weigh between ten and twenty pounds. The dogs weigh five to ten times more than the cats do! (Lally weighs around 55 pounds and Moose is closer to a hundred.) From a cat's point of view, the dogs are HUGE.

One way to help equalize that difference is height. If the cats can get up onto something and look down at the dogs, they might feel safer. I don't think I'd feel too comfortable with something five times my weight towering over me!

Another advantage of height is that the dogs don't often think to look up. We've walked past parked cars with cats on top and neither dog has noticed the kitty observers. This might give the cats a chance to watch (and get used to) Moose and Lally without the dogs staring back.

Armed with this information, we've decided to put a kitty condo in the hallway leading to the cats' room (on the opposite side of the baby gate from the dogs). The cats might feel confident enough to perch up there and watch the dogs from on high.

One problem? The hallway isn't especially wide. The majority of the kitty condos we looked at while at PetSmart had a square base. Something with a rectangular base might fit a little more easily into the space. So we're thinking about building our own kitty condo, custom fit to the hallway.

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Aimee is a fiction writer... dog lover... music lover...

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