Cat Territories
We ourselves should have heeded warnings when we were deciding which cats we were going to have as pets. People warned us that Somalis and Burmese would not get on. The Somali while sensitive and shy (though traditionally very affectionate and intelligent) was opposite to the extrovert, playful, people–loving Burmese. In the long run we feel their differences have added to their relationship.
I think because cats are fundamentally solitary characters (for instance, they do not go round in packs like dogs) they are necessarily also going to be territorial, however alike they maybe.
If you have house cats it may look on the surface as if they are sharing the house together. However if you look a little bit closer you will notice patterns and individual territories within the the overall environment.In other words there are sub-territories within the overall area. For instance one cat may only lie on one side of the bed. Or walk down one side of the hall. One cat may spend its time in the garden while the other will have the bedroom. Another way more than one cat will share territory is through a kind of “time-share”. For instance, one cat may have the chair by the radiator in the morning and the second cat will have it in the afternoon.
Within our house, Louie (our red Somali) and Ellie (our blue Burmese) have their own special places that the other doesn’t tend to go to at all. Ellie has her Hammock by the warm air radiator(Louis has his long fur to keep him warm so he’s probably not interested anyway); her igloo in the hall; the basket in the lounge and pretty much all of the bedroom. Louis has the spare room, the white box, the playstation (that’s for cats not the X Box 360) and of course the garden. Louie loves to hunt and the garden is his stalking ground. Ellie it seems tries but doesn’t quite get it right much to Louies' frustration!
There will always be a dominant cat. Within a small territory the dominance may change often. A cat that is physically highest in a territory (i.e. on a shelf or in a tree) is the dominant cat. That is why you will often see cats fighting over the higher areas in a house. It is also true that when one cat is licking another, it is the cat that is doing the licking that is dominant, not the other way around. Also a cat lying on his/her back is showing submission.
Sometimes you can see a hierarchy within a pack of cats. In the wild there are only three types of wild cats that go around in packs – the obvious being the lion. When we were visiting Ellies breeder we saw behaviour that we found quite astonishing. There must have been about 10 cats in the house. The breeder put the food out in one huge bowel and the cats all came running. But instead of eating the food they sat around the bowl waiting. Then in walked the very pregnant Queen. Only when she had eaten, the others dived in. The queen was deemed dominant here presumably because she was pregnant and needed the food the most. The domestic cats were in a sense acting like a pack of wild cats.