Fighting in the household: Think before you grab

After last week’s column on “cat wars”, a reader phones me about the cats in his house.
 The man adopted one cat from the soi a few years ago and named him Blackie, and recently adopted another from an animal rescuer, a somewhat younger boy he named Whitie. Then he sat back and waited for the two cats to make friends.
 Well, sometimes this method works; sometimes it doesn’t.
 In this case, the boys have been fighting non-stop ever since they met. The fighting has been mainly lots of bad language, but this morning, Blackie jumped on Whitie and began clawing and biting him.
 In alarm, the man reached over to pick Blackie up. The cat immediately turned around and administered some very deep scratches on his arm.
 “Why did Blackie do that?” the man asks me. "He has never attacked me like that. Never."
 I doubt that Blackie, in the middle of a catfight, even realised whom he was scratching. He was, after all, dealing with Whitie, and the man’s arm would be about the same shape and size as a cat’s body.
 For the same reason, you should never try to grab a dog in the middle of a dogfight, even if the fight hasn’t escalated to full-body contact. You could be badly injured.
 In addition, hitting fighting animals seldom forces them to separate, and you put yourself in danger anyway.
 To break up two fighters, I favour water from a carefully aimed hose. If you don’t have one, a bucket of water may work, unless the animals are too deeply involved in the fight.
 If one animal appears to be in danger – perhaps it’s smaller than the other animal, for instance – then if the water doesn’t work, try to find a strong rope, preferably with a noose on one end.
 When my cats are fighting, I find that scooping one up by putting my hand under his belly only leads to that cat attacking me, similar to what happened with Blackie. Instead, I grab the cat by the scruff (the skin on the back of the neck). I have to move quickly, to ensure that the cat I’m restraining cannot be reached by the other cat. Otherwise, the fight will continue.
 Some readers may have their own means of handling fighting animals, perhaps pepper spray or some other remedy. I don’t recommend these, myself. You could kill the animal with these chemicals.