Peace within Muli-pet homes
How to live in peace in multi-pet homes
It’s not uncommon for pet loving families to live with multiple dogs, cats, or a mix of both. It’s hard to just have one! However, the more pets you have the more complicated things can get. One of the most common issues I’m hired to help with is integrating or re-integrating pets that have stopped getting along or who have never gotten along from the start. The more dog-savvy and cat-savvy you are the better you’ll be able to create an environment where all the animals are set up for success in living together peacefully. Also, the more peaceful-living-skills you teach your animals the easier it will be to control their movements and avoid arousal and chaos leading to tension and conflict. Without peaceful-living-skills and without your own dog/cat savviness, you’re at a greater risk for running into problems at some point with in your multi-pet home. It’s also important to understand that you can’t control everything, your pets may get into fights at some point in their lives together regardless of how hard you worked to avoid it. Animals are emotional beings and can get stressed, angry, and fed up with the other beings they live with, just like people can and do.
It’s crucial to understand that space available is a very important resource for cats and dogs. Living in a small, crowded, cluttered space where animals may be forced into close proximity to each other is one of the top reasons I see as why pets are not getting along. For cats you can easily create more territory by adding cat shelves, towers, cat trees, and clearing off bookshelves. Dogs unfortunately are stuck sharing whatever space is available on the ground. For the ground territory you can help your dogs and cats by cleaning up clutter and moving furniture to open up space and eliminate as many narrow spaces and dead ends as possible. Additional areas in homes where forced proximity comes into play are doorways, hallways, and stairways. It is not a good idea to allow your dogs to crowd doorways and try to move through these narrow spaces in chaos. Instead, teach all your dogs to go to a station near the door and stay there until released by name, or at the very least teach your dogs to just wait at the door until released by name. For hallways put up pet gates so that you can control who goes through in what order.
Resource guarding is the next top reason pets get into conflicts. Unless they are bonded, dogs and cats do not like to share important resources. It is smart pet ownership to feed pets in separate areas so that they are not feeling threatened by one another. Anything given to your pet to enjoy that is high in value such as toys, bones, food stuffed Kongs/Toppls, lick mats, snuffle mats, etc. should be given to each pet in a separate area. This can be separate rooms or the same area separated by barriers or tethers so that they can’t bother each other. Attention and affection from you is a very important and limited resource that very commonly causes tension, jealousy, FOMO, and conflict with dogs and sometimes cats. Teach your dogs to wait their turn to be pet, played with , or trained.
It’s also important to know that stress, frustration, pain, discomfort and various health issues can lead to tension and conflict among pets. I have encountered many cases where the aggression between the pets was due to undiagnosed pain. I have also encountered many cases where the underlying reason for the aggression was stress and frustration from their physical and mental enrichment needs not being met consistently.
Learning cat and dog body language is a critical skill all pet owners need, especially if they are living with multiple pets. You need to know what your pets are communicating to each other. You need to be able to catch subtle signs of stress and tension so that you can intervene before things escalate.
Teaching all of your pets, including your cats, skills such as going to specific locations on verbal cue from any room and from any distance from you and to stay or wait there until released by their name is useful in many common situations where tension and conflict might pop up. For instance if you have one dog resource guarding something, you can send your other dogs away from the guarder to avoid a conflict. If you have dogs who get into conflict when trying to move through doorways to important areas like the yard outside, you can send everyone to a dog bed and have them stay until released by name to go through the door. If your dogs get into fights when arousing situations happen like a guest arriving, you can send them all to their respective stations and tether them if needed until things settle down. Station training is useful for cats as well. If you have one cat that is a bully towards another, you can send the bully away to a specific location.
Conditioning an interrupt and redirect strategy and practicing it often during peaceful times, so that it’s polished and ready for moments of tension is another smart move for pet owners. For example, if you can see that for whatever reason all your dogs are stiff and staring at each other, or maybe they’ve already started to do lip licks and show teeth, you can call out your interrupter, “Party Time!” (for example) to interrupt and diffuse the tension. Then you can decide what the next best course of action is, they need to be separated from each other so you can send them all to their respective stations (dog beds, crates, different locations in the home, etc.) or you can have them all follow you to a more open space and focus on a treat scatter (if there’s not food guarding in any of the dogs). For cats, if you see that they are stiff, staring, and their tail is rapidly wagging, you can call out your interrupter to diffuse the tension and then do a treat scatter in different directions, or lure one away with a toy or treat to another room, or use a target to have one follow you to another location. It’s recommended that you work with a behavior professional on what would be the best interrupt and redirect strategy for your unique situation.
If you’re already in a position where your pets are not getting along and there have been fights leading to injuries. Muzzle training all your dogs needs to be one of the first things you do. You can not proceed safely with re-integration between dogs that have bitten each other until they are all able to wear a muzzle comfortably. For cats, you need to be able to trim their nails or put on nail caps. For biting cats, muzzle training is a possibility but the only cat muzzle that would be appropriate for wearing during relationship therapies are bulky, awkward fish bowls that may take a long time for a cat to tolerate. You can use Elizabethan cones from the vet as a potential alternative to the fish bowl muzzles, but both options can be tough for cats to tolerate.
Summary of skills to teach:
Names
To only respond to their name
Go to specific locations (beds, rooms, crates)
Wait
Stay
Positive interrupter and redirection strategy
Turn taking