When Love Isn’t Enough - with Katya Lidsky
Loving our pets is absolutely fundamental to making your pet partnership work. And yes, it is work a lot of the time.
Bringing a new animal home to your existing pets can be a tough thing to get right. It can take a lot of time, energy, and effort, so loving them is a big part of staying sane and keeping everyone happy.
But sometimes, love isn’t enough.
There’s bound to be a little tension, but with a lot of work, training, patience, and management strategies, that should all pay off. But sometimes, it just doesn’t. You might have tried every tactic under the sun to help everyone get along, and it still might not work.
In a coaching call, I spoke with Katya Lidsky, animal lover, writer, and host of The Animal That Changed You podcast. We talked about her experience with fostering animals over the years and about the time she made the tough call to rehome a kitten to keep the peace with her other animals. Keep reading to see why it was the right call to make in Katya’s case.
Or if you'd like to listen to the episode, press play below:
Lessons learned from taking in foster animals
Katya has been fostering animals since 2008 and has taken in 62 animals over the years. In her words, most people who foster “want to do good,” but there’s little support on how to foster. Katya has learned a lot along the way but during the early days, things were much tougher.
One thing she learned was that while all the animals coming out of a shelter need love and attention, that’s not the only thing they need. They need boundaries and training as well, and all animals need a different level of attention and care.
At the moment, Katya has one dog, Sassy, an 11-year-old beagle mix and is hoping to start fostering cats again soon – hence why she jumped on this coaching call.
Setting up your house for success
When bringing any new animal home to meet your resident pets, setting up your house strategically is always the first thing to do. With Katya’s love for hounds and herding dogs, it makes bringing a cat home an extra challenge.
One of the first things that happens when you bring a cat home is they need to go through the decompression stage. Some cats are terrified and hide for days when they come from the shelter. Others are raring to go and don’t like being cooped up.
So, while having a safe room for the cat to hang out in is important, some flexibility is also recommended.
Here are my tips for keeping things flexible yet safe for a cat:
Start off in one room and let them explore it
Let them start to gradually explore the rest of the house
Make sure once they leave that room that there are still safe spaces dotted around the home
Try to set up multiple safe zones (ideally high up) that the cat can escape to if things get a bit much
Set up two layers of management between animals (closed doors, baby gates etc.) to start with
Making a difficult decision
One of the foster dogs that Katya took in was a five-year-old Belgian Malinois Shepherd named Phoebe. When Katya met her, she was in a bad way. Phoebe was very dirty, and a difficult dog who was about to get put down before Katya took her home.
Taking in Phoebe taught Katya most of what she knows about dogs, and is what inspired her to become a dog trainer. While she was only a foster dog, she never left because Katya didn’t trust anyone else to meet her needs.
Still intent on helping animals, Katya brought home a six-month-old kitten called Val, with the intention to foster her for the weekend. While Katya, her children, and her other dog fell in love with the kitten, Phoebe wasn’t impressed. In fact, the kitten was just prey in her eyes.
Keeping everyone safe became so stressful and unmanageable that they made the difficult decision to give up the kitten. In Katya’s eyes, Phoebe was less adoptable than a six-month-old kitten, and she was also there first.
Phoebe had already worked so hard to be a member of the family and was 15 years old by the time the kitten showed up. She had worked on living with other dogs and kids, and a kitten was just too much for her.
The problem with being overly optimistic
No one wants to give away a pet they love. And yet sometimes, it’s the best thing to do for everyone. If you’re just wishing things would get better or trying super hard to train and manage everyone, you’ve got to ask yourself at some point – is this working?
My advice is to look at the data:
Write down how many times a conflict happens a day
How many times are you all stressed about some altercation between your pets?
If nothing changed, ask yourself could you live with it?
The way I like to think about it is like a volume dial. There’s an intense version of an animal’s behavior, and there’s a “low volume” version. Most animals (and humans) won’t see that dial move up or down more than three notches out of ten.
If you have an animal that’s always a ten, they’re probably never going to get to a zero even with all the training in the world.
So, the question I posed to Katya was, what if you got Phoebe down to a seven? That’s probably the most realistic you could get her behavior down to with a lot of work.
Katya might have been able to keep the kitten safe with Phoebe at a seven, but she’d be on edge constantly. And that’s no way to live.
It was disappointing and upsetting, but ultimately, Katya did the right thing for the kitten and Phoebe and let it go to a great new home.
What coexistence really means
When we talk about living with our animals, it’s really all about coexistence. We need to get along, but sometimes there are struggles, just like there are with human relationships.
Coexistence isn’t about everyone being super close friends. Your cat and dog might never snuggle up together in front of the fire, and that’s okay.
For me, coexistence is a life together, not necessarily free of barriers or boundaries, but where everyone has their needs met. If there’s conflict, the animals have the skills and tools to work through that appropriately with our help.
If you find yourself in a similar spot to Katya, sadly, there’s no decision-making flowchart I can give you with definitive answers on what to do.
There are plenty of management strategies, slow introduction tactics and enrichment activities you can do with your animals, which I fully recommend. But at some point, you have to weigh up the damage that could be done and the stress everyone’s under.
No matter what you do, as long as you don’t make the decision lightly, you get help and consult with people, you need to do what’s right for you and your household.