Yikes! Midnight dog poop scares me to death also! ;)

I do hope fido is ok, though.

I started volunteering at the nearby SPCA a couple blocks from us about a month ago. Currently I'm just doing feline associate stuff (which mostly just involves cleaning their rooms and sitting with them for a while to help keep them socialized).

Pixel, our cat, really, really hates other cats. I've seen her react with complete calm to both giant quiet dogs and small yappy dogs. When given the chance she actually rode a turkey for several yards in her attempt to take it down. She's a bit skittish around other people but that isn't consistent.

But she hates cats. She hates seeing them outside through glass. The one time we brought an obvious runaway stray inside the house she completely freaked.

Anyway, the first time I worked with the cats I come home and sit on the couch. She comes over and starts sniffing my hand. "Cute," thinks I, "she can smell the other cat." And then she started attacking my hand full on. Teeth, claws, yowling, hissing. A fair amount of blood results. The rest of the evening I'm an invading force, she found a high observation point and just stared at me.

Lesson learned. The next two weeks I get home, I immediately change clothes and wash my hands and while her reaction is much more muted she'll still swat my hands if they get to close and she still doesn't trust me.

Last night, I came home showered, specifically washed my hands with strong antiseptic soap using a scrubbing spong from the kitchen then after that used Purell and then ate my dinner of barbecue chicken with my bare hands.

After all that I go and find the cat, let her sniff my hand and fwap. Claws in but she swatted my hand hard enough it actually hurt a little bit.

As I say, Pixel really hates other cats. And the odd thing is I can't figure out how she knows to hate other cats since she was rescued before even being weaned and since then, other than that 2 minutes with the stray I mentioned earlier, has never actually been in the presence of another cat.

I am sorry about your wounds, hope they are healing well.

Maybe she no longer recognizes herself as a cat but as part of your family. She's just jealous that her human is spending time with others that are beneath her.

At least she doesn't take revenge like our Tigger. Gary came home a day later than usual last weekend and Tigger was mad! First she scratched up his suitcase and got yelled at. So she went and peed on his shoes. Then to top it off she got on the table and peed on his wallet and keys! She was really mad at him!

Of course the day after he left the kid and I went on a field trip to the Ballet. When we got home she tried to pee on my bra!! Later that night I found that she had also peed in the tiny case that holds my meat thermometer. I still can't figure out how she managed to pee in a small piece of plastic the size of a quarter and didn't miss a drop!

Some cats just have really bad attitudes!

Well I imagine that that there could be the problem. Never having learned how to deal with other cats, all she has to go on is the pure instinctual gut reaction that other cat odors trigger. Had she grown up around other cats she'd have likely learned to temper that instinct with experience.

Well, that would be one of my questions, how does she even know what another cat is and smells like to hate it and be jealous (and she isn't jealous of other things). Plus jealousy (I don't really anthropomorphize animals so I also don't really think it would be anything similar to what we'd call jealousy) wouldn't explain it all since she's woken me up in the middle of the night yowling at the window and when I looked it was because of a cat sitting on a balcony in the next building over.

Mostly I'm just curious that I apparently can't wash off or cover whatever smell it is that she's reacting to.

We did have a cat when I was a kid that reacted badly to a new cat in the house (and it was specific to the cat we had others already). Shortly after the new cat arrived she started peeing in the stove burners. Swear to god. Now, I in no way believe the cat understood the chain of events that would result but let me tell you that boiling off cat piss results in an extremely unpleasant experience. And it is really hard to get in the habit of checking the burners for pee before turning them on. When we passed the new cat on to someone else she stopped.

She reacts even when she can't smell them. She reacts even when they aren't in her territory. She hisses at cats a hundred feet away. When we moved into this place and had a wall covering mirror she also attacked that cat too (though she has learned to live with it) for a couple of weeks; she's never reacted to the cats that live in smaller mirrors.

I'm not particularly worried about why she hates cats. I've known plenty of extremely loner cats (even after having had plenty of lifelong cohabitation with them). I'm just amused by how total it is.

Okay, odor and sight. Still sounds like an instinctual reaction and lack of socialization with other cats. She doesn't need to "know" what other cats look or smell like she's hardwired to "know'.

I think we're saying the same thing. Obviously the dislike of other cats is in someway hardwired into her. To the extent that I'm curious about the how it is at the much deeper level of how that would happen biologically in the neurology of a cat.

And of course it is possible that it was something social that happened in those few weeks between birth and being found in a gas station parking lot that imprinted itself powerfully.

But mostly in telling the story I'm just amused that I am now going through just short of CDC decontamination procedures just to keep my cat from glaring at me for an evening and it still doesn't work.

Wow - I thought our one cat (who hates other cats) was bad. Since we have three other cats, she gets exiled into her own room.

She hisses and spits (sometimes to the point of gasping - she is an old cat), but all the venom is directed to the other cat(s) - never towards us.

The only other things I've seen that causes her to react like she does to a cat are bubbles. We though she might play with them so tried them. She really did not like them.