After we had a few successful interactions between Niki and Freyja, we decided to introduce her to Ajax. Now, Jaxie has shown that he is not a friend to cats, and since he also antagonizes Pandora, we were a little more cautious when it came to him. We first did it when Freyja was a little sleepy, hoping that lower energy would give her less of the appearance of a threat to Ajax. That backfired a bit; she came over to sniff him, and he promptly bit her right between the eyes. No damage, just a bit of a scare for the pup.
Next, we got the boy out when Freyja was ready to play. That went much better, because Ajax was too busy running from hiding place to hiding place to even think about grabbing the pup.
Freyja and Jaxie have now had several playdates, and they maintain a tentative detente. Freyja is more than happy to jump on Ajax and smush him with her paws, and he in turn keeps trying to grab her paws and nose whenever she holds still long enough. But at least she isn’t intimidated by him now, and we’re holding onto the belief that he will quit trying to bully her by the time she grows up to be 15 times his size.
Freyja has also been introduced to Pandora now. We first got Panda out when Freyja was conked out at the end of the night, since Pandora is a bit of a jumpy girl in her old age, and we didn’t want an active pup scaring the living daylights out of her. Panda very bravely sniffed all the way around the sleeping dog, and when she started feeling comfortable enough to climb up on her haunches for an even closer look, Freyja moved, and Panda decided to call it a night.
The next time Panda asked to come out, Freyja was wide awake, however, so we got Niki out also, as a distraction. Pandora actually did very well, and was incredibly patient with the puppy jumping on her and trying to get her to play. We’ll have to watch Freyja to make sure she doesn’t get overly excited with Panda, but it was another relatively successful encounter, so our hopes are high that they’ll all be playing together nicely before long.
