Harriet

Before you bring your cat home, make sure you have:

• Collar and ID tag
• Cat carrier
• Food and water bowls
• Appropriate cat food
• Litter tray, litter and poop-scooper
• Comfortable bedding
• Scratching post, cat tree and toys for enrichment
• Grooming products
• Tick, flea and worming products

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Cats can find moving to a new home stressful, so it’s important to prepare as much as possible before bringing your new cat home. A few things we recommend are:

• Security: Make sure that all doors and windows are shut and that any other escape routes, are blocked. Update your details on the microchip registry, at the local veterinary clinic and on your cat’s identification tag, so if your cat goes missing, they can be returned to you.
• Prepare a room for your cat: Slowly ease them into their new home by confining your cat to one room in the house for a couple of days with everything they need (e.g., a comfortable bed, favourite blanket and toys, scratching post, litter tray, food, water).
• Gentle encouragement: Release your cat in the prepared room when the household is as quiet as possible and sit with them while they explore their new space. Encourage them to explore by hiding small amounts of dry food.
• Exploring the rest of their new home: Over the next few days, make more areas available to them.
• Enrichment: Enrichment involves mentally and physically stimulating activities that engage an animal’s mind, body, and senses (e.g., smell, taste, sound, smell, touch). Ensuring that your cat can engage with enrichment items and activities will help them have positive experiences, and cope with any potential stress.
• Introducing unfamiliar animals: If your cat is meeting unfamiliar animals for the first time, ensure they have separate resources, and introduce them gradually.

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The basis of your cat’s diet should be a high quality balanced premium commercial cat food that is appropriate for their life stage and health status. A balance of wet and dry food is preferable. Never feed puppy or dog food to your cat as it will be deficient in taurine, an essential protein that cats can only obtain through food.

Provide some moist foods such as wet canned food or pouches in the diet regularly as this helps to ensure adequate water intake and can help maintain a healthy urinary tract.

The amount of food required will depend on your cat’s size, age and level of activity, but you should take care not to overfeed or underfeed. Your vet will be able to weigh your cat, assess your cat’s body condition score and provide advice.

Adult cats tend to prefer eating several smaller meals throughout the day/night, which is how they hunt if they live in the wild. They should ideally be offered food at least 4 to 5 times per day because eating smaller frequent meals has been associated with greater urinary tract health and is consistent with their natural feeding pattern.

Ensure clean fresh drinking water is always available but do not provide milk as this can cause gastrointestinal upsets.

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Yes, it is okay to keep your cat at home all of the time, as long as you make sure that you provide them with an environment that is optimised to meet their physical and mental needs, allows and encourages the expression of normal feline behaviours, minimises stress, and promotes good health and welfare.

Visit the RSPCA Safe and Happy Cats website for more information

Most cats can learn how to use a litter tray from an early age and often do this on their own without any assistance. For the first few days after you bring them home, to help the process you can, place them in their litter tray within half an hour of feeding time and encourage them to scratch around in the litter.

Praise your cat when they use their tray correctly but do not punish them if they have an accident outside of the tray. Punishment is not effective and may be counter-productive if it makes your cat stressed about toileting.

onsider the following to increase the chances of success:

• Place litter trays in quiet, private but easily accessible areas, away from food and water. Avoid frequently moving the trays so as not to confuse and stress your cat.
• Cats like to have the choice between multiple litter trays so one cat needs at least two trays in physically separated locations. In households with more than one cat, provide at least one litter tray per cat plus one, in multiple separate locations.
• Provide enough litter to allow your cat to dig.
• Cats like to keep clean. Faeces and urine need to be removed daily, and litter trays emptied and cleaned regularly. A towel or mat underneath the litter tray is recommended to stop slippage and allow the cat to wipe their paws.
• Cats can have strong individual preferences for certain litter trays and litter types. Offer different things to see what they prefer.