Cat versus Dog: the Endless Reprisals

[gilescooper]

So, I've got this great silver-haired cat, around a year and a half old now, who just had a litter of kittens about five and a half weeks ago. She's an indoor/outdoor cat, but I've kept her inside for the last month and a half or so, and she has not expressed much interest in going outside anyway. However, we live in a kind of dense suburb (town-houses, duplexes, that sort of thing). There is a bit of suburban wildlife in the area; my roommate and I have seen possums and raccoons and such on the deck out back (we have a third-floor apartment, accessible from the decks on the back). Raccoons like to nest on the roof sometimes. Anyway the point is that there are strange, unknown, and large animals that lurk around what Catherine (that's her name, we call her Cat for short) considers her territory, especially at night.

Now, the kittens are approaching adoption age (I'm aiming at 12 weeks before I let them go). I'm inviting [responsible] friends over to pet them and check them out and see which ones they like, either by color and pattern, or by personality. One of my friends has the special circumstance of having a dog (which I think is about a year and a half old), so I told her to go ahead and bring the dog over to my apartment to see how the kittens and dog would react towards each other. Now, the dog was mildly curious, and the kittens gave a cursory hiss (however they did this the first time they saw me looming over them the day they opened their eyes as well).

Here's the thing though. Catherine, the queen, had a total freak-out. I mean, I heard sounds come out of her that I did not know were possible. She growled like a wildcat. Like a mountain lion, a puma, a cougar, a panther, whatever you call it in your part of the world. She lunged right at the dog. She was not happy with the dog at all!

We sequestered her outside for the rest of the visit, and the kittens and the dog got along fine, so the meeting served its purpose, in determining that the kitten will work at her house.

Now, I've searched around a bit and I see plenty of advice for how to handle a possibly aggressive dog when you have a new kitten. But, since my Cat is not at all happy with non-feline, non-primate animals (actually I've only tested humans; I will let you know when any other primates are introduced in the house), I was wondering this:

How do you introduce a larger pet in to a house that already has a highly defensive/territorial feline?

First, let me say that I realize that dumping a large semi-puppy in to a cat's nursery room is pretty stupid and her being defensive is to be expected. Perhaps a better question is:

How do I indicate to my cat that animals that she is naturally scared of are okay, especially when she has already been trained otherwise?
(Specifically, she has learned that larger animals like raccoons and possums are not to be trusted, so why should she trust an even larger, even less-cautious animal like a canine, which is her natural predator?)


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