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What Do You Do When Your Dog Tries To Kill Your Cat?

If You Are Me You Write It Down

Jessica Russell
4 min readAug 24, 2022

Content advisory warning: animal trauma

Photo by Alvan Nee on Unsplash

The dog is a rescue from Spain. She’s not the dog in the picture but she is the same colour scheme but to the power of ten. She was once a street dog, taken in by a rescue. They nursed her back to health since she had a bloody stump where her tail had once been and was starving and underweight.

Whilst she was in the rescue they cat tested her in the parlance of dog rehoming outfits. We watched a video of her completely ignoring a cat as they shared a room for a few minutes. We would never have been able to rehome a dog that was aggressive with cats because our (also rescue) moggy is now quite elderly.

Due to having been a street dog, it was inevitable she came with problems. And we work around most of them. But every so often, she just goes for the cat. I know that it’s linked to resource guarding — basically when she thinks there is either food around or the potential for there to be food around imminently. So the kitchen and the boundaries to the kitchen are trigger areas.

Tonight the cat, who is probably a bit senile now sadly, was loudly demanding more food at bedtime. She can really set up a caterwaul, despite having been fed mini meals multiple times today…

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Jessica Russell
Jessica Russell

Written by Jessica Russell

Freelance writer. ADHD PhD research student. Educator. Author of The Life of Louise Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X http://jessicarussell.co.uk/

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