cat fight

We came home from a 5-day (including travel time) trip to find that our two cats had been fighting. Utmost hostility still reigned and more fights broke out.

This was unprecedented. Usually a milder "don't get along" is a sufficient descriptor. It's really sort of one-sided. Tybalt is big and rambunctious and likes lots of stimulation, while Maia is smaller, older, and quiet. Typically, Tybalt jumps Maia in order to play. She doesn't like this, hisses at him (which he's oblivious to) and runs away.

But now they've been getting into actual fights when encountering each other (I haven't seen these, but I've certainly heard them), and Maia is now spending all her time in her last-resort hiding place, a tiny narrow space under a cabinet which Tybalt can't get into. She's not eating or drinking, and I hope not pooping, because moving that cabinet, which is full of books, would be a bear.

Tybalt, meanwhile, seems weirdly abashed. He still wants lots of affection, but he's disinclined to play with toys and has abandoned coming into my office and walking around on my desk, which used to occupy most of his attention when I was working and he was not sleeping. I think he's depressed and lonely with no Maia to bug.

We were puzzled by all this. It's been a year since we were both away, but we'd been out several times before and never had a bad reaction like this before.

Yesterday afternoon, B. found a possible answer.

She heard yowling, and thinking it was another fight, went downstairs and found Tybalt up against a window, yowling at a cat outside. (Our cats are indoors only.) We'd never seen this other cat before; when B. went outside to chase it off it kept coming back but eventually disappeared through a hole in the fence to the apartment complex next door. Perhaps someone living there had adopted it.

Our cats, who love the windows for providing Cat TV of squirrels and birds, would surely be unhappy to find another cat in their view. Certainly the late Pandora went utterly berserk when another cat showed up on the patio of our old house. It would be useless to chide our cats for defending their territory; the only course is to, as B. did, chase off the other cat, even though obviously - because of the returning - its interest in our cats is to make friends. No luck there.

B. thinks that maybe this other cat had showed up the previous day or two, and inability by our cats to do anything about it led to displaced aggression against each other. I hope they get over it, because we're living in an armed camp in here.