Help with Angry Cats

Fiona, veterinary surgeon and practice owner, shares her personal experience with her own cat, Ripley. Ripley was brought in to Wakefield Westgate Vets4Pets as a stray kitten back in 2022. Her and her husband Chris (also a vet) took her on and named her after Fiona's favourite movie, Alien. 

Personally, I think there are few things as scary as being chased around your house by an angry cat. I don’t mean a slightly annoyed, you didn’t feed me fast enough cat. I mean one filled with fire of a thousand demons who literally wants to end you. Unfortunately, that’s the position myself and Chris found ourselves in after Ripley, our cat, had a rather short-lived stay in a cattery. A lovely cattery, with underfloor heating and all the fuss you could want. However halfway through her stay she decided she’d had enough. This meant organising a friend to collect her early due to her “anger issues” and the fact the poor cattery owner was having to use a cardboard barrier to prevent herself being injured and her demonic screaming was upsetting the other guests.

Aggression in cats is a really tricky one to navigate, as trying to find out what they are angry about can be very difficult. In our case one day Chris wasn’t even allowed through the front door and was met with howling, snarling and attempts to attack. So where do you even begin? First step is making sure they are fit and healthy, so getting into your vets for a full health check to make sure there is no pain or any other signs of illness. We got that one ticked off straight away and all was well physically. Now to tackle her cat brain, tricky at the best of times. We identified when the behaviour seemed to be worse and what could possibly be triggering it. She seemed worse around her “resources”, so anything she valued highly. In her case, this was her food, her water bowl and her litter tray – especially if we emptied her urine from it (her poos were fine to go for some reason).

We decided this did make sense, as she possibly decided she needed to start guarding her resources when she was in an unfamiliar surroundings and this continued once home. So we decided to spread everything out. We put her food, water and litter trays in different rooms and on different floors to each other. This meant she wasn’t having to defend a tiny area and we placed everything as out of sight as possible. We bought enough Feliway and Pet Remedy Diffusers to tame a pride of lions and placed one of each on each floor of the house near her resources. Feliway is a synthetic pheromone which helps to calm and Pet Remedy is a special blend of essential oils. This started to take the edge off her fury and at least we were able to enter the house now, you take the wins where you can.

Next was distraction! We knew that cleaning out her litter tray makes her furious, so it became a two person military event. Chris would distract her in another room with some treats with the door shut whilst I did the clean up without her knowledge. I also started to train her and teach her tricks, so when any other event was about to happen which would trigger her (such as emptying the kitchen bin, I don’t know if I even want to understand what that is about), I distracted her with training and treats. So far she has learned to come, sit, spin and sit up, something which has been really easy to teach as she is very food orientated.

So far this has all worked well. We have had quite a few weeks of peace, no anger and a much more relaxed and chilled out cat. All joking aside, it was very stressful as we were concerned what would happen if we never got to the bottom of it and if we would ever be able to have visitors again, as we couldn’t even trust her not to attack us. So if this does happen to you, don’t panic, we are living proof that there are things you can do, you just need to reach out to your vets and get some help. If you are interested in cat training, there are loads of resources and videos online to help.

Good luck to my fellow cat people – Fiona.