Risk Assessment and Prognosis of Feline Aggression

Risk Assessment

As with dogs, there is little scientific data to provide a reliable means of prognostication, but the same basic issues remain when considering safety during the treatment of feline aggression problems:

• Will the cat bite [again]?
• What harm may it do if it does?
• Can the cause for the aggression be treated?
• What ongoing risk will the cat present after treatment?
• Whilst treatment proceeds, can people and animals be kept safe from the cat?
• Are the owners willing and capable of accepting and safely managing the immediate and long-term risks?

There is also a need to consider the amount of warning that precedes an attack and how often such attacks may occur. Infrequent but severe attacks that occur without much warning represent a genuine threat to safety and carry a poor prognosis.

As with dogs, there is an absolute necessity to follow up and manage these cases and to make sure that clients do not place themselves or others at risk. Predictability of aggressive behaviour is critical, as is preparing the owner with a plan of action should aggression be seen.

In many cases cats show inhibited behaviour and subtle initial signs of fear or anxiety. Clients must be able to identify these in order to fully understand the cat’s behaviour.

Predictability

As with dogs, the apparent predictability of attacks is of crucial importance in managing and treating aggressive cats. Very rarely is aggression truly unpredictable, unless the stimulus that triggers it is an internal one that is not obvious to the observer e.g. certain kinds of pain or medical disorders. Once the pattern of the cat’s behaviour has been established, then management is much easier and it is also possible to identify any departures from this pattern, which might indicate that the problem is expanding or getting more dangerous.

Signs to Predict Aggression Aggression is often labelled as ‘unpredictable’ when this is rarely the case. Usually there is a discernable pattern to the cat’s behaviour:

• Any warnings the cat has given [eye contact, posture, growling, hissing].
• Any avoidant behaviour the cat has carried out, including freezing.
• Timing [certain times of day].
• Relationship to events or activities [territorial trigger, arrival of a visitor, play, grooming, feeding, owner departure from the house, etc].
• Presence of certain stimuli [a noise, another cat, unfamiliar people, etc].
• Relationship to the actions of a person [raised hand, shouting/shrieking, sudden movements, cornering the cat, picking the cat up].

To safely treat aggressive cats, the motivation for every aggressive incident must be thoroughly understood and a pattern of behaviour identified if possible. The owner should be asked to describe what happened at each event, and not to interpret what happened. The first priority is to use this information to prevent injury. If attacks were truly unpredictable then this would constitute a serious and unavoidable risk that would not be acceptable.

Prognosis

Prognosis depends upon the owner’s commitment to carry out what may be a lengthy course of behavioural therapy, along with making potentially permanent changes in the cat’s husbandry and environment. In cases where cats are being asked to live in large feline groups with several unrelated individuals it is important to consider the welfare implications for the cats concerned and in cases of inter-cat aggression within the household, re-homing should be considered as a viable treatment option rather then a sign of therapeutic failure. Despotic cats that terrorise the neighbourhood carry a poor prognosis unless there is considerable co-operation between owners with regards to confinement, either permanent or on a rota basis.

The nature of the aggressive behaviour is important. Defensive behaviour has a better prognosis because it is possible to reduce the perception of threat and to provide the cat with alternative opportunities to deal with fear [such as through escape or avoidance behaviour]. Offensive aggression carries a more guarded prognosis unless full recovery from some medical underlying pathology can be achieved. Hyperthyroid cats, for example, carry a good prognosis for reform once the underlying pathology has been treated.

Other indicators of a good prognosis include selection of alternative coping strategies, such as retreating and hiding, in cats that are fearful or anxious and improvements in effective feline communication between warring cats in the same household. Decrease in both the intensity and the frequency of the aggressive incidents should be seen as favourable prognostic signs. Owners often find it difficult to be objective regarding progress in cases of feline aggression and there can be a considerable differential between actual change and the owner’s perception of alterations in the cat’s behaviour. It is therefore essential to persuade owners to keep a daily diary and to record all aggressive incidents, together with notes about the context or trigger for the behaviour. Likewise a record should be kept of affiliative behaviour because a shift in the balance between these types of behaviour is a strong indicator of change.