Kitten Guides

The Importance of Play and Companionship

The most persistent myth about cats is that they are aloof, solitary and self-sufficient — that a bowl of food and a warm windowsill will do. It is a convenient story, and it is not one we recognise. Cats need stimulation, they need to be worked, and a great many of them are happier with feline company. This guide explains why, and what to do about it in an ordinary home.

Where the “Solitary Cat” Myth Comes From

The myth has a grain of truth in it. The domestic cat descends from the African wildcat, a largely solitary, territorial hunter that meets others chiefly to mate or to squabble. What the myth ignores is everything that has happened since. Cats have lived alongside us for thousands of years, and in that time they have proved remarkably adaptable socially. Where food is plentiful and concentrated — a farmyard, a fishing harbour, a back garden with a generous neighbour — free-living cats commonly form colonies built around related females: mothers, daughters and sisters who rest together, groom one another and sometimes help rear each other’s kittens.

So the honest position is neither “cats are pack animals” nor “cats are loners”. Cats are facultatively social. They can live alone, and they can live very companionably, and which one suits an individual cat depends on its temperament, its early experience and the household it finds itself in. Assuming solitude is the default is where people go wrong.

The British Shorthair Temperament

British Shorthairs sit at the companionable end of that spectrum. The breed is known for being placid, even-tempered and genuinely people-oriented — a cat that likes to be in the room with you, on the sofa beside you rather than on your lap, following the household about its business. That calmness is often mistaken for low needs. It is not. A placid cat that is bored simply becomes a quietly unhappy cat rather than a noisy one, which makes the problem easier to miss. You can read more about how we raise for temperament on our ethical breeding page.

Play Is Rehearsed Hunting

Understand one thing and everything else follows: play is not a frivolity for a cat, it is the hunt performed without the prey. A cat working a toy runs through the same sequence it would use in a hedgerow — stare and stalk, chase, pounce, catch with the paws, and finish with the kill-bite, usually followed by a short pause and a self-satisfied groom. A satisfying play session is one that completes that sequence. A frustrating one stops halfway through.

This is why wand toys and small prey-like objects work so well. Something feathered or furred on the end of a string can be made to behave like a bird or a mouse: darting away, hiding behind a chair leg, freezing, breaking cover. Move it away from your cat rather than towards them — prey flees, it does not charge — and let them catch it, hold it and bite it. Feathers, fabric mice, crinkle balls and paper bags earn their keep. Please supervise anything with string or elastic, and put it away afterwards: swallowed thread can cause serious internal injury, and is a common emergency.

Why We Are Not Keen on Laser Pointers

A laser pointer produces a wonderful chase and never once produces a catch. The cat stalks, sprints, pounces — and closes its paws on bare carpet, over and over. Survey work has linked heavy reliance on laser play with frustration-related and repetitive behaviours in some cats, and even setting the research aside, the logic is plain enough. If you do use one, always end the session by landing the dot on a real toy or a scattering of treats so that the hunt finishes with something the cat can actually hold. Better still, use a wand.

Little and Often, and Let Them Win

A hunting cat does not work one long shift. It makes many short attempts across the day and night, most of which fail, and eats several small meals rather than one large one. Play is best matched to that rhythm.

• Short sessions, several times a day. Five or ten focused minutes, two or three times daily, does far more good than one half-hour marathon at bedtime. Dawn and dusk are when most cats are naturally liveliest.
• Let the cat win. Allow plenty of successful catches, and end every session with a clean capture. A cat that never catches anything is being teased, not played with.
• Rotate the toys. Cats habituate quickly and lose interest in the familiar. Keep most toys in a box, put out three or four, and swap them weekly — the same mouse returns as a new mouse.
• Never use your hands. Wrestling with fingers teaches a kitten that skin is a legitimate target, and it is a difficult lesson to unteach at four kilograms.
• Finish before food. Hunt, catch, eat, groom, sleep is the natural order. A play session just before a meal often settles a cat beautifully.

Make Them Work for Their Food

A bowl asks nothing of a cat. Food puzzles, foraging feeders and treat balls restore a little of the effort that eating is supposed to involve, and they are among the simplest enrichment changes you can make. Introduce them gently — start with a puzzle so easy it is almost cheating, so the cat learns that persistence pays — and never let a struggling cat go without. Our kittens are raw fed from day one, which does not lend itself to a dry-food puzzle ball, so we tend to suggest foraging games with a portion of the daily allowance in other forms, and scent and texture variety rather than gadgetry. Any change of diet should be discussed with us or with your vet first.

A Home Built Upwards

Cats read a room in three dimensions. Height means safety, a good vantage point and somewhere to retreat that is not the floor, and a home with vertical routes feels considerably larger to a cat than its floor area suggests. A sturdy cat tree, a shelf or two, a cleared top of a bookcase and a padded window perch all pay for themselves. So does a tall, rigid scratching post: scratching is claw maintenance and scent marking, not vandalism, and a cat denied a proper post will find your sofa arm instead. Our own cats live indoors with access to a protected, enriched garden, which adds the one thing no living room can — weather, insects, birdsong and genuinely novel smells.

The Bored Cat Is Not a Naughty Cat

When a cat has nothing to do, the energy goes somewhere. It may appear as shredded furniture, three-in-the-morning zoomies, food obsession and creeping weight gain, over-grooming to the point of thin patches, night-time yowling, or an ambush on your ankles as you pass the stairs. Some cats do the opposite and simply withdraw — sleeping eighteen hours a day, disengaged, greeting nobody. None of this is misbehaviour, and punishment will not touch it. Please do treat any of it as a question rather than a verdict, and see your vet first: over-grooming, appetite changes and sudden aggression can all have medical causes such as parasites, skin disease, pain or thyroid trouble, and enrichment is not a substitute for a diagnosis.

The Case for Two Kittens

We will always raise the question of a pair, and we raise it most firmly with households that are out at work all day. Two kittens — ideally littermates, or two raised together — give each other something no human can provide in our absence: a playmate available at three in the morning, a warm body to sleep against, and a partner who bites back proportionately. In our experience they usually settle faster into a new home, because each has the reassurance of the other, and they self-regulate their play in a way a single kitten and a pair of human hands cannot. The wilder energy tends to go into each other rather than into your curtains.

The costs are real and should be said plainly: two kittens mean two purchase prices, two sets of vet bills and insurance, more food and more litter trays — the usual guidance is one tray per cat plus a spare, and the same generosity applies to beds, bowls and high perches. If that is comfortable, a pair is very often the kinder choice.

The Caveats Worth Hearing

None of this is a universal rule. Adult cats introduced badly to one another can be a genuine disaster, and the resulting tension — blocked litter trays, stress cystitis, a cat living permanently on top of the wardrobe — is far worse than a little boredom. If you already have a cat, the introduction must be slow and scent-led: separate rooms at first, swapped bedding and cloths so each learns the other’s smell, feeding either side of a closed door, then brief supervised meetings through a barrier, and only then shared space with plenty of escape routes and high places. Expect it to take weeks, not days, and take advice if it stalls.

And some cats, particularly those who have lived alone since young adulthood, genuinely prefer to be the only cat in the house. They are not being difficult. Forcing company on such a cat is unkind, and a single cat with an engaged owner, good vertical space and proper daily play can live an excellent life.

How We Raise Ours

Our kittens grow up underfoot in a busy household, with their mother, their littermates and the other adults of the cattery — our queens Prada, Lila, Amber, Janine and Barbie, and our cinnamon stud Aris. They learn to play from cats who are better at it than we are, they learn bite inhibition from siblings who complain, and they learn that people are a source of good things. That grounding is half the work. The other half is yours, and it is the enjoyable half.