Cats and Dogs Living Together [View all]

[MineralMan]

For over 20 years, my wife and I have been cat people. We've had a bunch of the feline companions, but once we moved to Minnesota, we settled on just having two. Both are neutered females, and both live 100% indoors. One cat per lap seemed to be enough. They got along just fine and provided humor and a friendly four-footed presence in our little house.

All seemed well, but my wife got a hankering to have a dog. You know how that goes. To find just the right dog, she started volunteering at a shelter, walking and feeding the shelter dogs, figuring she'd find just the right one while volunteering. After a few months, she came home and told me she had found THE dog. Now, I'm skeptical about things, so I asked a lot of questions about this dog. Was it house trained? "I don't know." How is it with cats? "I don't know." Is it friendly? "Seems to be." I didn't care for the first two answers, but the third answer was OK. I looked at the photo of the dog on the shelter's website. It was a Beagle/Basset mix, and had a nice face, but I was still skeptical. We have two cats who know nothing of dogs, and a house that we try to keep relatively clean. "I don't know," I told my wife. "I know," she replied. And that settled that.

So, we adopted this unknown quantity of a dog. We bought leashes, a big wire kennel, expensive dog food to be processed into dog poop, and various toys and other paraphernalia associated with dog ownership. But the questions still remained: Will the dog harass the cats? Will it deposit its processed dog food on the floor? Who will walk it? Who will take it outdoors in the middle of Winter in a snowstorm? Never mind. We drove to the shelter and brought Dude back with us. Into the kennel he went as soon as we got him in the house.



We named him Dude. About an hour after we got him home, he demonstrated that he was, indeed house-trained, insisting that he go outdoors to do his dogly business. One problem solved. But what of the cats? After he was back in his kennel, our elder cat, Scout, walked into the room, did a double-take, and slowly and stealthily approached the kennel. Dude? He wagged his considerable tail mightily and stuck his nose through the wires of the kennel. Cat sniffed. Dog sniffed. And that was it. After walking him on his leash past the cat a couple of times with no problems, we gave him the freedom of the house. No issues. Mostly they ignored each other. The other cat, Beasley, a basement dweller, made her peace with the dog a few hours later, although she still hisses at him if they encounter each other unexpectedly. Dude simply ignores such rude behavior.

A truce was established. Different points of view were accepted and civil behavior maintained. I was relieved, my wife was happy, and the dog joined the household. My worries were for naught. Good news all around.

Since then, we've adopted another rescue dog, a beagle from the Beagle Freedom Project. Having lived in a laboratory cage for 3 years and having been used in some sort of experiments, he had never seen a cat, and was suffering from canine PTSD of some kind. We brought him in, but didn't put him in a kennel. He'd had enough of kennels, we figured. Anyhow, he apparently determined immediately that our two cats were some sort of strange-looking dog, and never gave them another thought. Our 17-year-old elder cat decided that Sam, the rescue beagle was pretty much OK, and now sleeps next to him, although without any physical contact, of course.



Different points of view. Different species. And yet, they manage to co-exist without too much conflict. Neither species really understands the other fully, but they manage to interact at some level and maintain peace. It occurs to me that if dogs and cats can live together, perhaps it is possible that the varying viewpoints on DU needn't result in incivility. Perhaps we should acknowledge our differences, cautiously sniff each others' butts, and co-exist without rancor. Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned from dogs and cats living together. I don't know. Maybe we can even extend that into the rest of our interactions, outside of DU, to some extent. Seems worth a try to me.