Curiosity can keep a cat wondering what is behind the door to the attic, basement, or garage. Cats love new things to explore. But for some cats, there is an extra motive to expanding their boundaries, even if such boundaries are only mental ones.

If we have a confident, assertive, and intelligent cat, they want to expand their Reach.

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We see Reach in action when our cat sees another cat out of the window. Since anything they can see is “their territory,” this interloper should be dealt with. And cannot be. So our cat might work themselves into a fruitless rage over the trespassing cat, since they cannot go out and drive them off in person.

Which is just as well, since the trespasser might be a streetwise brawler who would clean our cat’s clock for them. It’s an awful thing to try to get our cat to the vet when they are dazed from shock and need their scalp sewn back on, so please, don’t assume cat fighting solves anything.

However, we can do a few things to solve this problem; they all involve understanding how different cats view their territory.

My Ultimate Gamma cat, Puffy, loved to lounge on the windowsill, but it was for the amusement factor of the tiny cars and people (we are on the third floor.) He defended no territory at all. Another kind of cat will regard anything they see as their territory, and they must defend it. This is a cat who patrols the windows as much as they lounge in them, and they often pester us at forbidden doors.

They might want Reach.

We can take steps to drive off the marauding cat; setting our lawn sprinklers for the times of day the cat comes around, trying to figure out who the cat’s owner is and having a discussion with them, or, if it’s a stray, investigating live traps so we can evaluate their situation.

In the meantime, we can diffuse our cat’s frustration by giving them more territory. Even if it is only a closet. If we worry about dangerous objects, it can be supervised; our cat will rush about, perhaps looking for the trespassing cat, and being soothed by the discovery that this place is all theirs.

This satisfies their instincts; our cat might still see the trespassing cat in the future, but they can turn off their instinctive alarm by exploring another territory that is still “protected.” Without some kind of closure, our cat’s frustration builds, and they react more violently each time they see the cat they cannot deal with.

We can inadvertently feed their response. It’s bad enough our cat must rage at the window while the trespasser displays “my territory” signals. But when we get upset with the trespasser too, this heightens our cat’s reaction and convinces them it’s even worse than they thought.

This is a tough problem because so much of it is out of our control. The trespassing cat could belong to a neighbor who lets their cat roam at will. The trespasser can be a stray no one takes responsibility for. We can spray the cat with water, we can put orange oil in places they like to sleep, and we can use big chunks of bark mulch to create an uncomfortable bed in our garden. But attempts to take our yard off this cat’s route don’t always work.

Only Cats, highly assertive cats, and insecure cats are the most likely to “go ballistic” when they see interlopers. A cat who is already sharing territory has less drive to keep it free of other cats, though sometimes the response is just as strong in a multiple cat household. That’s because our cat likes their friends, but hates their enemies.

If this is the case, we can try making the enemy into a friend.

Whether the trespasser is a stray or owned, we can display to our cat that we are controlling the situation. Sometimes, the best thing to do when we cannot drive away a cat, is to pull the cat in under controlled conditions.

We can try making friends with this cat. If friendly, we can rub their chest with our fist and then let our cat smell our fist. This makes it unlikely we will transfer any pests or diseases. Smelling our human scent, and the strange cat scent, will help dilute our cat’s reaction.

If it’s a stray who evades our live trap, we can put out food and water at times we are home. That way we are standing by to show our cat we are monitoring the situation. I’ve known strays who can’t help approaching food and water when they see there is no cage around it.

We can try to get the stray to a no kill shelter. If there are only terrible alternatives around us, at least we are getting this poor cat some steady sustenance. In this situation, letting our cat smell the dishes before they are washed, or the paper plates before they are dumped, will make the unfamiliar more familiar.

Remember that our cat going crazy at the window is the problem; it’s a Reach problem. The one thing we cannot do is convince this kind of cat they should ignore parts of their territory. What we can do is:

These are all ways of bolstering our cat’s sense of specialness. They obviously have a low threshold for tolerating other cats. Giving them a space all to themselves, acknowledging their concerns in a cool manner that does not add fuel to the fire, and showing that the trespasser cat is not as bad as our cat’s imagination has built them up to be, all works to lessen this tough problem.

There’s one added benefit of co-opting the trespasser cat in some way; they might keep other, unknown quantity cats out of what they regard as “their” territory.

It’s the solution that keeps working.

For more about cats and territory, see Cats and Territory Templates.

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