Cat Anxiety Problems and Solutions
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How to reduce cat anxiety: Summary
- Scaredy cats! Cat anxiety, fears and phobias can be helped by understanding the cause of your cat’s anxiety.
- Management of the cat anxiety issue involves providing the cat with a safe space, preferably up high.
- Long term solutions involve desensitising the cat to the anxiety-provoking issues. Medication may also help.
Causes of the cat anxiety problem
Cats can be confident creatures but at times they can be scaredy cats! Cat anxiety, fears and phobias can be helped with a little understanding, patience and a few tips on how to reduce cat anxiety…
Fear is a normal part of life but anxieties and phobias are not. Finding a solution to your cat’s fears requires understanding just what is causing them. Here are some common causes:
Negative experience
Most kittens and cats are willing to greet new experiences with a confident paw and innate curiosity. Most experiences turn out to be positive ones and the kitten is calm and accepting or playful and positive.
Occasionally, however, the experience turns out to be a negative one. Your kitten feels scared. If the fearful experience is repeated, or even if it is only experienced once but it extremely painful or fear-provoking, your kitten may learn to fear that stimulus.
No experience
Cats may be fearful of experiences that they encounter for the first time, especially if they have never encountered them when young. The new experience has them on edge, alert and perhaps ready to flee.
Your cat may be experiencing fear, anxiety or phobias to events that they have had little or no experience of in early life.
Cat anxiety can be shown to objects such as balloons, umbrellas or to events such as guest in your home.