so originally me and my girlfriend had 2 female cats (Cleo and Joan). then one day she brought home a stray female during a storm(Marie). Marie and Joan did not get along that well and we're kept separate because as it so turns out, Marie was pregnant. she gave birth to 4 adorable kittens, two of which we have so far found a home for. after a few months we decided it was time for Marie and her kittens to get the hell out of our bedroom. it was rocky at first but eventually all was well and everyone got along or tolerated eachother. But we noticed that our two original cats Cleo and Joan were starting to get a bit chunky (we've always just left a bowl of crunchies for them to eat and then wet food twice a day. with the kittens down we mixed in kitten dry food) and that regular + kitten cat food probably wasn't as good for the kittens as just straight kitten dry food. So we decided to separate the dry foods and give it to them a certain times of the day (putting the kittens in one room to eat and the cats in the other) but that's been to put it bluntly disastrous. Joan is out and out attacking Marie now for the past 3 days (it's been a gradual escalation) and seems extremely angry. whats the best course of action to find a happy ending here? should we keep at it a little longer and see if things calm down? or should we put the dry food dish down and return to mixing kitten and regular cat food? I'm thinking it's joan trying to set up a pecking order but it's concerning since they had just started to really tolerate eachother to see it all go so drastically down the hole.
If you need to introduce cats to each other, you need to separate them from each other like you had originally done. But having them able to communicate between each other. With our cats, we had the doors ajar between the rooms with planted doorstops and gradually opened them over the month. They'd usually claw at the door when the other cat was near, other days they would stare for hours through the crack and playfully swipe each other. Soon enough they would familiarise themselves with one another.
When I worked at a zoo, they did something similar with a new bobcat. They kept him in a separate enclosure behind the other cat's pen, but all that separated them was some metal grating. Took them a long time to get used to one another.
Mixing kitten and cat food isn't a good idea for either the kittens or the adults. It's not super harmful, but keeping them separate will keep them all healthier.
the cats are introduced and integrated well (even the two whole don't like each other are getting along well enough) it's just that we recently changed our feeding system and it's having a negative reaction between those two.
We have a cat that we called Cleo, until we noticed that he had testicles. So now we call him Johnny Dankworth. He attacks our other cat all the time. She's old and slow and cranky. At first we thought he was just trying to play, but now I'm not so sure. Even though we had him fixed, he's very territorial. Have you talked to a vet about this? They might suggest something useful.