My cat is making the dog nervous!
Does your cat do some things that kinda freak your dog out?
In this Dog and Cat Chat, Naomi and Matilda talk through some ways to address both sides of cat-dog relationship - to find appropriate outlets for Beau's sometimes over-the-top behavior AND to give Delilah the skills to cope when he triggers her.
What you'll hear in this episode:
why you might not want your dog to lay down and "be calm" when the cat is being exciting
how you noticing "pre-behaviors" gives you insight into what is triggering your pets
what to do about "[horizontal] zoomies"
when reinforcing with food might not be the best option
To listen to the full episode, click here to open it in your podcast player or press play below:
Meet Delilah and Beau
Delilah: sweet, mostly chill, can be a little reactive
Beau: obsessed with food, confident, loves his people
The Initial Plan: address sticky spots
Delilah resting in living room, Beau approaches
create a target area of the couch for Beau to head towards (not directly towards Delilah’s resting area), reinforce with attention
Beau gets behind the couch, does “horizontal zoomies”
provide other opportunities for scratching horizontally (either under couch or in area around couch)
take data: does he zoom more often on days he doesn’t get as much wand toy play?
reinforce Delilah away from Beau when he zooms, treat scatter or toy play
Updates from Matilda:
Our Follow-Up Chat:
Naomi: Love this footage! Her ears are back and her brow is a bit furrowed - is that what she normally looks like at baseline?
Matilda: Her ears are usually back to some extent, even when relaxed! I think her brow is slightly more furrowed than normal and she’s holding her head down a little bit. She’s typically quite stoic but when he approaches she just holds herself very still, so I kind of get the sense that she’s.. not 100% sure what to do?
Naomi: Yeah - "freeze" is an alternative stress behavior to "fight" or "flight" - she doesn't look ACUTELY stressed but has probably figured out that the best thing to do when he comes around is to just let it happen.
Matilda: Sounds about right! I’ve been basically just throwing a piece of food for Delilah away from Beau whenever he does that so she gets some practice just moving away instead of freezing and I feel like it’s going well!! She’s choosing that option more often now.
You know that bed Matilda talked about in the episode? Where Delilah gets a little squirrel-y if Beau approaches her while she’s on it? Yeah. It’s this one ❤️
YAY! Go Delilah and Beau! 🥳
Any future updates from Matilda will be put here - stay tuned!
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And I think now that you mentioned that, I think that's probably what Delilah is noticing too, when he goes and lurks near the couch. Because sometimes when he does that, it turns into the horizontal zoomies….
Hello, you cat and dog people. This is It's Training Cats and Dogs. The show for people with both cats and dogs who want peace in their home and peace between their animals. I'm Naomi Rotenberg your source of practical strategies for keeping everyone in your multi-species household safe and sane. And today's episode is a Dog and Cat Chat with Matilda, whose dog Delilah and cat Beau are Cautiously Coexisting. Yay! But there are some things that Beau does that kind of freak Delilah out. She either freezes or gets amped and yes, those are two sides of the same coin. So we talked about ways to tackle those specific sticky spots from both sides of the relationship.
All right, so let's get into it.
So tell me about them, a little bit about their history and what you're dealing with right now.
Yeah, so I got my cat Beau first. I got him as a kitten. He's always been a very confident, pushy, almost cat. Even when he was tiny, he would push around the bigger cats that were living in the house at the time. He's very social. He wants to be where the people are. He's, yeah, very playful and obsessed with food. So obsessed. It drives him insane.
His food? Other people... like what kind of food?
Any kind of food, like there are very few foods that he will not obsess over. He loves his own food. He meows for it a lot. He will get into cabinets, he will open any door that he knows there's food behind. I have to have a vault for the dog food. Not to keep the dog out, but to keep him out.
So yeah, pretty much any food... the trash I have to have a locking trash can...
Okay, cool. So he is highly food motivated to the point of unnecessary.
Yes. Yes.
And he's always been that way? Never - wasn't a sudden change or anything?
No, it's always, yeah, he's always been that way. He's just... I don't know what it is, but, and he's never been hungry in his life. He's always had enough food to eat, but he's just, yeah. Yeah. Very food motivated. So that can come in handy. I've been able to like, train a few things with him using food. So that's been useful.
And I've had him now for, let's see, he's turning six this year, so I've had him pretty much his whole entire life.
So about two years after I got Beau, I adopted Delilah. She is now seven. She was three at the time. She is like a very chill, like stoic dog most of the time. She's very sweet.
She can be very playful, but most of the time she like leans towards the chill end of the spectrum. She's also very food motivated but she definitely is of the two, she more nervous, sensitive. We've worked through a lot of reactivity stuff with her and she also has a pretty strong prey drive.
So that's kind of them in a nutshell, each of their little personal.
And most of the time they get along really well, but they definitely have a few things that kind of encite chaos between the two of them.
Got it. So we're talking about particular sticky spots, like either in the house or in the routine that tends to cause tensions to arise. Okay, great. So let's concentrate on the sticky spot that it's the most intense conflict or happens the most often.
So I think what that would be is when we're all in the living room. So they're both animals that want to be where the people are.
You made me wanna sing that Little Mermaid song,
Yeah, exactly. Unintentional, but I love that. So if me and my partner are in the living room on the couch, they both wanna be here. Anytime we're all, like me and him are in the same room, the pets are both there.
Delilah has a bed that she sleeps on most of the time when we're in the living room. And we live in an apartment, by the way. It's a little bit small. So we have a living room and we have a bedroom, and then a room that the pets don't really go in that much unsupervised.
So the living room is where they kind of butt heads. And what happens most of the time is Delilah will be chilling on her bed, sleeping, relaxing, and one of two things happens. Either Beau will come over close to her and just be near, and as he's approaching, she gets nervous. Like I see her like kind of whale eye, avoidant, lip licking, like she doesn't like when he comes close to her when she's sleeping on her bed and relaxing.
Or he will do this thing where he lurks around the bottom of the couch and gets this sort of crazed energy where he wants to like scratch around the bottom of the couch in circles. And of course that gets her like really excited and she wants to go into chase mode.
So it's half of it is that Beau is making her uneasy because he's the one kind of closing the gap and making less space between the two of them. And then sometimes it's that Beau's playful energy is causing her to be overly aroused.
Got it. Okay. So a couple of questions. Number one is, can you anticipate when both of those things are going happen? Like, do you know that he is going [by some behavior that he's doing], that he's gonna do that approach thing and then she's gonna be uncomfortable.
Not like before it starts happening with that. I can see when he's sort of starting to walk over into that area though. So yeah, there is time before she starts getting uncomfortable where I know he's walking like from the kitchen over to where she is. So yeah, there's a little bit of time there.
And what about the horizontal zoomies?
That. Oh God. I don't even, sometimes it's after he poops. Sometimes I don't even know what causes him to feel that way. It's like he just gets this crazed like energy. I don't know. It's possessed.
He can be totally at rest in the living room and then start zooming, or is he usually coming in the room to zoom?
So I think what it is, now that you asked that, I think it's that he will start by sitting under the edge of the couch.
And then that could turn into him flipping over and grabbing onto the couch from upside out.
So if you were paying attention, you could probably be like, oh, he's getting into position for his behavior.
And I think now that you mentioned that, I think that's probably what Delilah is noticing too, when he goes and lurks near the couch. I think it's, that might be a cue that she's noticing that he might be about to do that. So that could also be a reason why she starts to get nervous when he's just sitting there under the couch because sometimes when he does that, it turns into the horizontal zoomies.
So the reason I ask these questions about like anticipation or, let's call them pre-behaviors, is because number one, we can use those for management or like preemptive redirection. Or we can just prepare ourselves for whatever is going to happen. So we're not we're being more proactive rather than reactive.
It also helps because we can theoretically do a little bit of work to deescalate whatever those triggers are. So let's break that down a little bit cause we're talking about two different behaviors here.
We always want to first think about, okay, what is the management options that we have already in place and are the animals' needs being met? So let's think about Beau approaching Delilah while she's resting. Does he have a goal in mind, does he want to jump up on the couch to sit with you and he just happens to pass by her or does he want to interact with her?
I think he just wants to be in the zone where we all are, because what he will do is he will just, he will approach and he'll just then sit. So he'll be like, maybe, he'll close half the gap between them and then he'll just sit there and that makes her uneasy.
Got it. Because he's probably like basically staring at her, even though he might not be actively staring at her. He's just staring in the general direction towards all of you.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So let's think, so the function of that behavior seems to be social proximity, right? He's like, I just like being near everybody. And then the behavior he chooses is sitting.
Okay. What, if anything, can we do to have him get that same function from a different behavior? So could we have him could we train him or help him move more around the room and then to target like a little bed on the couch or something?
We might be able to do that.
I don't know what your living room looks like where the kitchen door is, like the door, he normally comes in, like where her bed is, but there could be something there where like maybe moving her bed, like a foot and a half to the left, , and then having him target, move towards a specific spot on the right of the couch, would give her enough space to realize he's targeting that area and he's not moving right towards her.
And then you can actively reinforce him with pets and attention when he chooses to be close to you over here, instead of doing that like awkward, lurky, stare-y thing that cats sometimes do.
Um, does that sound like something that could work?
Yeah, so it makes me think... we have basically a tiny little table next to the couch that has chairs and he will often come and instead of coming to sit on the couch or the rug where he makes her uncomfortable, he'll come around the other side of the couch and sit on the chair and she doesn't have a problem with that at all.
Is there a way that you would suggest making that more likely that he would do that rather than sitting on the couch? On the, I guess the couch or the rug?
Yeah, so there's a couple of things. Number one is you could use food, right? But that would probably amp him up. So we're thinking about like, how can we positively reinforce him for choosing to hang out in that spot? So what I would recommend is, okay food is fine, but it's not really what he wants in that moment anyway, so I would say, he should get more attention and praise, whatever he likes, socially, if he's in that spot than if he chooses to go anywhere else. He's allowed to go anywhere else. It's not, like, you know, we're saying you have to stay in this particular spot, but we wanna make it worth his while... that it's like if he wants social attention - social attention is redundant - but if he wants attention and social proximity, that's where he's gonna get the majority of it.
Yeah. Okay.
So it behooves him to go there. And that's the thinking about, like what is he really wanting in that moment? If he was doing a particular behavior to get a rise out of Delilah, for example, we would have a totally different training plan, but that doesn't seem to be the case, at least for this particular behavior.
Not for this one. Yeah. Sometimes I think maybe, cause he'll like, even though she has a history of occasionally chasing him, more times than I would like to have allowed, he will sometimes just come over to the rug where it, he's clearly in her view and he'll just roll over on his back and I'm not sure if that's just because that's what he wants to do or if he is trying to entice her to pay him some attention. I'm not sure what his motivation is behind that, but sometimes...
Yeah, cat's rolling on the back is an ambiguous behavior. There's many different reasons why they would do that. Without knowing like exactly what the situation looks like... where he's looking, what she's doing, it would be hard to tell whether that's like a social solicitation or not.
Yeah.
But you could look at that, right? You could say, huh? Is there a pattern? And then how does she respond when he does that? Also, in those chases? Has she ever gotten to him and hurt him, or is it just for the fun of the chase?
She's never hurt him and he's never hurt her, but she has gotten to him. So it has happened where she's chased him and then he'll flip over on his back and she does this I don't even know, nuzzling of his like belly. And he doesn't hurt her. She doesn't hurt him. So in the past I've wondered is this consensual?
I don't know..? Sometimes she'll chase him and he'll run away and then she stops chasing him and he'll come back. So I'm like, sometimes I feel it feels like genuine play, but I just don't. Sometimes I think she takes it too far.
Yeah, the visual that you're presenting could very well be play. So it's nice to have that in the back of your mind, especially if he is coming back after she has voluntarily checked whether he's into it. But your last point of whether she takes it too far is important because we would want to make sure that you can recall her off of him.
Before you allow this type of interaction to continue more often, then you would wanna make sure that you're working on that type of positive interrupter of okay, that's enough! Thank you. Let's go over here and chill. So that would just be like a separate skill to work on with her. And then once you feel like she can recall off of like very exciting things then you could see whether if you let things go a little more than you are doing now, what that turns into. Especially because they've never heard each other. They've been living with each other for three years. So we have a pretty robust history of them having direct contact with each other and interacting without any safety concerns. You have a little bit more leeway to experiment of let's see how this goes.
Yeah, cuz she does have a pretty solid, that's something that we've worked on a lot where if she starts chasing, I can say her name and she will come, she'll snap right back to me because I usually follow that with a big kibble scatter and that seems to be really like reinforcing for her.
It really works to get her, she pretty much recalls every time. So yeah, that's good to know.
Yeah, look, take it with a grain of salt. I've never seen the behavior and this is like a very short window into their lives. I would love footage of all of this stuff too, because there's some subtleties, right? Like the nuzzling and then her backing off is indicative potentially of her really wanting to engage with him, but not really knowing how to do it. So we can play around with it. Definitely. And would you say that when he has the horizontal zoomies, is that when those chases tend to happen the most?
I would say that is a pretty consistent trigger for her that will pretty much always get her to perk up and want to go immediately near, like to where he is. But it's not the only time that happens. I think it's like any time that she is in a state of heightened arousal in general. So if I've come home from work after a long day and she's excited that I'm back, she's more likely to want to go find him and in involve with him.
But yeah the couch zoomies, I would say is definitely a consistent, like I can pretty much predict that a hundred percent of the time, if he starts doing that and I don't do something to interrupt it, it will incite a chase.
Got it. Cool. I love consistency and predictability. So let's go back to our management and needs being met for this second behavior. So number one, what are you doing to play with him?
So with Beau, I will put Delilah, cuz she is crate trained, and she's a lot better with separation than Beau is. Beau will meow until I let him into any room forever. But I'll put Delilah in her crate or in a room. And then toys that are like flirt pole-ish...
Wand toy stuff? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, he really likes that. I also take him out on a harness and a leash, and he loves that. So he goes and explores around outside, and that's really enriching for him. He also really likes, there's like a little rubber duck in the bathtub that he likes. If I like scoot it around in the bathtub, he'll chase it around the tub.
That just happens to be one of his favorite things. Yeah. Yeah, that, those are like the main things that I do with him. And we also do training. I've done, I've trained him like sit, hand targeting, recall.
Awesome.
That's fun.
So do you normally do that type of play in the living room?
Yes. Yeah. Obviously, in the bathtub that's in the bathroom, but...
The other stuff is in that spot.
So I would be interested to see if we could find a pattern between like when this particular zoomie type thing happens and what kind of enrichment or play he's had that day, how long it's been since that... Look, zoomies happen even with the most enriched animals, they just have some extra energy to burn, but they're probably a little less likely if he has gotten some energy out during the day.
So number one would be figuring out that pattern and making sure that need is met. Although it sounds like you're doing a fantastic job.
Could definitely do all those things more for sure.
Yeah. You always could, right? But you could always do more. Maybe. But the important thing is having a good balance. Like we don't wanna over excite him and have him like, be participating with stuff all the time. So then he becomes like a junkie, right? Like he, he can't chill out.
So I would make sure that there. At least equal amounts of time in that living room where you're doing nothing and he's just relaxing and versus actively engaged in some activity. But the other thing... because we know that if he goes underneath the couch in a certain spot, that he might go horizontal.
We could use that as a cue for us to ask Delilah to do something, right? So like we could say Delilah up on the, I don't know if she's allowed on the couch, but up on the couch and then she gets food while he goes nuts.
Yeah, so I was gonna ask you about that actually, that's one of my main things that I've been wondering about is that she has a bed and she has a really solid, go to bed cue. So when he starts doing that or when he does anything that makes her perk up a little bit, I will just say Delilah, go to bed.
And then I'll do some treat scatters on the, or kibble, scatters on the bed. But then I also have been wondering, like I don't want that to feel like she is then trapped in this situation where he's in close proximity doing something really exciting and she is just really excited and maybe even frustrated.
Really great points. So there's two things that I would ask about that. Number one is, what is her body language looking like? When this is happening, and also how far is her bed from the couch? Because if her go to bed is 15 feet away and she's just sitting there watching him act a fool and she's, relatively relaxed, then I would say, that's a perfect way to handle it.
If she's four feet away and she's tense and she's doing a stare, but still eating because she's obsessed with food, that would be a different scenario. Which one is she?
It's more the latter. It's because the couch, I mean her bed is basically in the corner ish of the room and the couch is in the middle and it's maybe four to six feet diagon - yeah. So I would say that it's definitely more like the latter in that she is, she is, like, tense and definitely not relaxed when he's getting really crazy.
And so sometimes what I will do is, especially if he's scratching up the couch anyways, I'll just take him away. Like I'll say, go to bed, I'll do a kibble scatter, and then I'll just redirect him to his scratching post or something like that.
And how readily does he do that?
Surprisingly readily cuz if I just take his little paws and put them on his little scratch board, he just starts scratching that. So it actually works surprisingly well. And then that's less exciting for her.
Okay, my brain is going a mile a minute. So number one, I'm surprised that you can interrupt his zoom and touch him and move him without him freaking out. So that's a big indicator that it might not be true zooms, cause those are kind of uninterruptible, they're a motor pattern that just have to play out.
The fact that you can redirect him to a different scratching post indicates... does he have any horizontal scratchers?
He does have one. No, it's the scratcher itself is horizontal, but he isn't like on his side scratching it. If that makes sense. It's like he's on top of it, scratching it, and then he has one that's hanging so he can stand up and scratch.
Okay, couple of things that we could play around with in terms of management and enrichment to see if we can decrease the amount of this particular behavior happening from him, and then address her kind of in a separate way once we figure him out. So it could be that he wants a scratching option that allows him to, you guys can't see me because I'm, this is an audio podcast, but I am leaning over and I'm scratching, like on my side, right? So if he has found that the couch allows for the ergonomics of that really well you could provide him with a scratcher either next to the couch or around the base of the couch.
Like one of those like super cheapy, cheapy cardboard things that you can just attach and see if he will do the horizontal scratching behavior onto that. Or maybe have them like line the base of the wall or something like that. He might say, no - couch. Must couch. This is unacceptable alternative, but it's, a relatively inexpensive thing to test.
Yeah.
If you block off the underside of the couch, you might also see a difference in what he chooses to scratch. So you could play around with those two things. Now, that behavior still might be very exciting for Delilah, but at least he would be scratching not the couch. So for you to be happier and we would then have a better idea of what the function of the behavior is. It's not the couch in and of itself, it's just getting that type of scratching behavior out.
And then once we figure that out, the other side of this is Delilah, right? You're saying, and I think you're completely right, that when we're asking her to go to bed and stay there, She's like, I am stuck. And she can't be moving at all.
So sometimes what works, and this is different for every animal, but if they are an animal that wants to chase so they are space reducing in that kind of stressful moment... it sometimes helps to get her moving into some kind of movement pattern rather than stay there, right?
So if he's zooming and we take her maybe to the edge of the room or into the hallway and do ping pong with her, where she's chasing treats or something like that, she might get the movement urge out while still being able to react, but learn to do it more appropriately. So how does that land on you?
I think that sounds really good, especially because that's something that I have done before where if she feels the need to chase him, sometimes I will just offer her toy instead, and then it has happened where she's actually interrupted herself and gone for the toy. Like she'll look at him and then she'll go get her stuffed cow.
it.
So I feel like that's definitely possible and since that's something that she's offered me in the past, that seems like something that's likely to work. I think I just have to be far enough away from what he's doing with the toy that she won't then be like, yeah, this is fun, but he's right there. Let me also get him. So I think if I take, take her away with the toy. And play with her in an adjacent room. While he's doing that, her arousal is up, so she's like willing to play and she can take it out on the toy. I think that would really work well.
Yeah. So you could, The question is, do you want to get the arousal out in an arousing way or do you want to use the arousal and then channel it into a more calm, movement-based activity. You can try both, right? One might work best in some certain situations. The other might work best in different situation, right?
So it might be like, before she goes totally over threshold, you might be able to get her with a toy and then play with her and it would remain a fun game, but she's not gonna be totally out of her mind. Whereas if you're interrupting her from a big, cortisol, everything is nuts in her mind, and then you would need to calm her back down out of that. Then she might need a more cool down activity, like a kibble scatter away, or ping pong or something like that. So definitely play around with that. And I agree that the amount of distance that you can get is gonna be really important.
One last thing to consider is the timing of when you do that, right? So when does this start? Do we start the redirection procedure for Delilah once she's already noticed him but not gone over threshold? If we can, that's ideal, but if we miss it, we also need to have something to do where if she's already basically mid-chase, you have the redirection of her name and the snappy snap and all of that options.
But understanding that's not going to be training, that is just management.
The goal is she notices him doing his pre-behavior, which we want him to do. Like if he needs to do that behavior, we want him to be able to do it. We just don't want it to cause conflict between them. So if she notices that pre-behavior, then we would immediately cue her to do whatever the activity is away from him.
That would become her kind of default option if once she sees it after a while, does that make sense?
Yeah, it does cuz I, I mean my goal is definitely to prevent it from continuing to be what she wants to do. So yeah, I think anything that's gonna rather than just managing anything that's going to create a new default behavior for her is definitely gonna be what I wanna go for the most.
Yeah. And I think your original idea of go to bed, like that's a perfectly viable idea if we weren't seeing a buildup of frustration and we don't want her to go to bed behavior to deteriorate in any way. Like we want it to remain strong. I think switching it up and not making her stay through something that's really difficult is gonna hopefully be helpful.
Okay.
What is the next thing that you're gonna do after this conversation?
So what I want to do is I wanna like just experiment a little bit with the different things that I can offer her once she's in that situation because I wanna I wanna practice doing some things that kind of bring her arousal down when she's in that aroused state and I do love a good kibble scatter.
I could definitely do that like in another room and get her moving a little bit rather than asking her to stay on her bed while he's doing that. And I think I'm really intrigued by the idea of creating horizontal scratching opportunities for Beau, because that didn't even occur to me as something that he's clearly asking for slash getting for himself.
So I think that could really be helpful and interesting to see how that goes. So I'm definitely gonna look into that.
I would love an update. And it really could be, that's one of the things that's really funny, is just like I, I say, okay, here's this suggestion. It could go over like gangbusters. The whole behavior chain could totally change. Or he could just say,
No
No thanks. I prefer my way to do it.
And I wish that I knew like how to predict whether it would go that way, but sometimes you just have to do the experiment.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited to see how that goes and see if he's at all intrigued by that. Or if it really is just like the couch is like his perfect little scratching thing.
I look forward to hearing about the changes that you put in. You're doing so much good stuff already. These are just some small tweaks for those particular sticky spots. And I know there are more, but like this was the big area. But I think this is something that a lot of people are going through where there's just that one thing that the cat does that drives the dog absolutely bananas. So hopefully this gives you and other listeners some ideas for things they might try in those situations.
If this episode gave you some ideas for things to do with your own cat and dog. Or made you feel less alone in your trials and tribulations with your dog reacting to your cat's zoomies, please subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. And leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, because I read all of them and I am so appreciative of everyone who takes a minute to write something.
Like this wonderful review that came in on my birthday. Naomi's podcast is great for anyone looking for help with their multi-species household. Full of helpful information and funny stories. Highly recommend. Ah, reading those words was such a great birthday present and very positively reinforcing for me. So you will probably see more episodes in the future. Ha ha. That's an operant conditioning joke.
Anyway. I will be live on Instagram this Thursday at noon Eastern, to answer your questions about the episode and to dive a little deeper into zoomies, also known as FRAPs Um, I should insert some kind of Starbucks joke here.
Um, I can't think of one. Okay. So, if you want to know what FRAPs are, make sure to follow me @praiseworthypets and check out my stories for a link to that live. So you will get a reminder that it's happening.
And if you want to be awesome, like Matilda and do a Dog and Cat Chat with me on the podcast, go to praiseworthypets.com/chat to get on my schedule. And I cannot wait to talk with you. And that's all for this episode you wonderful cat and dog people i'll see you next time for more It's Training Cats and Dogs.
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