Your Rescue Cat's First Week

Longer than most people expect, and the rough shape is three days, three weeks, three months. The first three days are usually hiding and very little eating. By three weeks the cat has learned the routine and started testing the space. By three months you are meeting the actual personality, which is often noticeably different from the cat you met at the shelter. Nervous cats and cats that came out of rural or colony situations take longer. A slow start predicts nothing about the outcome.

Completely normal, and it is the most common first-week worry there is. A cat that has just moved has lost every familiar smell, sound and surface at once, so hiding is a sensible response rather than a problem. Leave food, water and a litter box in the room and let the cat emerge on its own schedule, which at first will usually be overnight. Do not drag a cat out from under a bed. That teaches it that hiding does not work and that you are the reason, and it sets you back a week.

One closed room, ideally a spare bedroom or a quiet bathroom, holding everything the cat needs for the first few days. Litter box in one corner, food and water well away from it, two hiding options, a scratching post and the carrier left open. A whole house is overwhelming to an animal that does not yet know where anything is or where it could escape to. Restricting the space actually speeds settling up. Open the rest of the house one room at a time once the cat is eating and using the box reliably.

Slowly, over seven to ten days, and not during the first week if you can avoid it. Ask the shelter what the cat has been eating and buy that food before pickup. Once the cat has settled, mix a small amount of the new food into the old and increase the proportion gradually. Changing diet abruptly on top of the stress of a move is the standard route to diarrhoea, and a cat with an upset stomach then starts avoiding the litter box, which turns one problem into two.

Not at the same time, and preferably not for several weeks. Use whatever litter the shelter or foster used, then change it later in gradual steps if you want to. A cat that dislikes a new substrate under its feet in an unfamiliar house will find somewhere else to go, and once it has chosen a corner of the carpet that habit is hard to undo. The standard is one box per cat plus one spare, scooped daily, kept away from both the food and the busiest part of the house.

Within the first week or two, even though the shelter has already done the medical work. The visit is less about medicine than about registering with a clinic so you have a relationship before you need one urgently. Cochrane has two established practices in town, Cochrane Animal Clinic on 403-932-5875 and Arrowhead Veterinary Centre on 403-932-2370. Bring the paperwork the shelter gave you so the vet can see what has been done and when boosters are due. Ask about new client wait times when you phone.

Go now if a male cat is straining in the litter box and producing little or nothing, because urinary blockage is life-threatening within hours rather than days. Also urgent: open-mouth or laboured breathing, repeated vomiting, refusing all food for 24 hours or more, obvious injury, seizures, or a swollen painful abdomen. Cochrane clinics keep daytime hours, so after hours the referral is Western Veterinary Specialist and Emergency Centre in Calgary on 403-770-1340, open 24 hours. Phoning costs nothing and waiting can cost everything.

Into Calgary, and you should know this before you need it rather than at two in the morning. Cochrane Animal Clinic refers after-hours small animal emergencies to Western Veterinary Specialist and Emergency Centre at 1802 10 Avenue SW in Calgary on 403-770-1340, which is open 24 hours every day. That is roughly a 30 to 40 minute drive on Highway 1A in decent conditions, longer in winter weather. Put the number in your phone on day one and drive the route once in daylight.

A slightly reduced appetite in the first day or two is expected and not alarming. A cat that eats nothing at all for more than about 24 hours needs veterinary attention rather than more patience, because cats develop serious liver problems from not eating far faster than dogs do. Try warming wet food a little to raise the smell, offering it somewhere quiet rather than a busy kitchen, and leaving the room while the cat eats. If nothing has gone in by the end of the first full day, phone the vet.

Through a closed door, and more slowly than feels necessary. Keep the new cat in the safe room for at least the first week and feed both cats on either side of that door so each associates the other with something good. Swap bedding between them so they learn each other's scent before ever meeting. Then try brief supervised visual contact, then short supervised time together. Hissing and posturing early on are normal. Sustained fighting means going back a stage rather than pushing forward.

Assume it will try, because a cat that arrived last week has no reason yet to think of your house as home. Keep the safe room door closed while people come and go and get everyone checking behind them as a reflex. A microchip registered to your current phone number is the single most useful precaution, and Cochrane requires a cat licence anyway under Animal Bylaw 04/2016. If the cat does get out, search close to the house at dawn and after dark, looking low and under decks rather than up.

Whenever it decides to, and pushing accelerates nothing. Some cats climb into a lap on day two. Others take three months and then never leave. The reliable way to speed it up is to be boring and predictable, feed on a schedule, play with a wand toy daily, and let the cat approach you rather than reaching for it. Sitting in the room doing something else entirely works remarkably well. Attention offered rather than demanded is the whole trick with a nervous cat.

It works better than people assume, especially with a bonded pair or two cats that already know each other. They settle faster because they have each other as a familiar element in an unfamiliar house, and they keep each other busy through a long foothills winter when nobody is spending much time outdoors. Two strangers introduced simultaneously is a harder project. If you want two, ask the shelter which cats they would like to place together rather than picking two unrelated ones yourself.