It’s no secret that cats and dogs aren’t always the best of friends. While it’s not true that cats and dogs will always, well, fight like cats and dogs, as the saying goes, we can’t expect that our furry friends will always get on well with each other, either.
But while there are never any guarantees, there are things we can do to increase the likelihood of our pets getting on well with each other, or at least being able to coexist peacefully together – your dog enjoying the best puppy food while your cat snoozes in the next room – and a large part of this is how we introduce them to each other.
The Dogs Trust, one of the UK’s leading dog welfare charities, found as part of its Generation Pup study that a puppy’s age and the speed of their introduction to cats can have a big impact on their behavior toward their feline family members.
The charity found that one-fifth (20.1%) of pet parents introduce a new puppy to their existing cats immediately, with a further 18.9% doing so in under two hours. However, gradual introductions between puppies and cats increased the chances of them getting along significantly, making dogs and cats living together a lot more peaceful.
The research found that puppies introduced to cats over more than one day are calmer and more friendly, which can lead to a better relationship.
"The advice is that it's done really gradually,” explained Dr. Rachel Casey, director of strategy and transformation at Dogs Trust, per Sky News. “In an ideal world, what you'd want to do is to have the cat in a situation where it can escape, it can get out of the way, so maybe somewhere high that the cat can go so it doesn't feel threatened by the puppy.
“And what you really need to teach the puppy is to be calm in the presence of the cat. So you want to have them introduced at a time and a place where everybody is sitting down, it's really quiet, and probably have the puppy on a lead and distract it with something, so you're doing that introduction gradually.”
Should I let my dog play with my cat? It’s a question many pet parents ask, but Dr. Casey said that the majority of puppies whose parents took part in the study showed undesirable behavior when first introduced to a cat – like chasing them, playing when the cat didn’t want to, or being aggressive. Fewer than one in 10 puppies were calm and relaxed.
This is understandable, and perhaps unsurprising – we all know how much energy puppies can have! But to minimize the impact, it’s best to introduce puppy to cat gradually.
The Generation Pup study is the largest of its type in the UK, with more than 9,500 puppies already taking part – almost half (4.500) of these have interaction with cats.
As the project is a cohort study, the dogs will be followed over their lifetime. As a result, the researchers will be able to investigate and analyze how early-life experiences as well as genetics can influence behavior and health as dogs get older.
If you’d like to learn more about our four-legged friends, why not take a look at these interesting dog facts and interesting cat facts?
