There's nothing like a snort of champagne and a sniff of pheromones to change the mood. I was lucky enough to be invited for the snort at BSAVA when CEVA launched Feliway Friends along with some of the great and the good....well actually the good turned up later for the CEVA Welfare Awards but the bubbly was welcome after the annual fight to get into Birmingham and the company was convivial from the start.

In my blissful ignorance I confess that when I first saw the pack and the Feliway Friends name I thought I was about to be introduced to some kind of disease-management-programme to support the existing Feliway Classic range. But it wasn’t this at all - whilst it can be used alongside the existing Feliway product and using the existing dispenser, it’s an entirely new product containing a copy of the cat appeasing pheromone naturally produced by nursing queens to support their kittens after birth.

CAP apparently helps cats feel safe and secure to maintain a harmonious bond between them. That all makes perfect sense to me as I can see that if you were unable to attach yourself to your preferred nipple this would almost certainly give rise to competition, jealousies and conflict. Apart from the obvious sense of using it to reduce conflict e.g. when introducing new cats to the house the data CEVA have (1) demonstrate in a clinical study versus placebo that it was effective in the management of aggression in multi-cat households with 84% of owners believing there was a significant improvement in how their cats got on after using it.

Why that is important is CEVA’s own market research has also demonstrated that, as will be no surprise to vets or vet nurses, about 44% of cat owning households have more than one cat and about a 1/3 of those experience fighting and aggression between pets in the household. I doubt that the product alone will resolve every conflict between cats and probably this product will be more successful if used by professionals who understand both feline medicine and feline behaviour. That’s probably an opportunity for anybody in the practice, vet or nurse, who has an interest in cat behaviour to brush up on the product before emailing anybody on the database who has two cats registered with the practice to let them know there’s something new for them; or maybe a chance to contact those who might have just got a new kitten or kittens. At any rate I think you'd want to find out about it....there are so many of those telly programmes now on cat behaviour with cats wearing trackers that even my daughter seems to be an expert on how cats behave - it's likely this product is something you'll be asked about and will need to know about.

We have just the one cat now so I can’t tell you from personal experience whether it works but the data seem sound enough to want to give it a try and the rationale looks good. We do have conflict in our own household but that’s mainly because of our one cat bating the dogs, “…call yourself a terrier?...you wuss!!!”.

It doesn't look as though the data support resolving conflict between terriers and cats...maybe it's not conflict, maybe the terriers like hating the cat. I can tell you though that if there was any chance at all of this stuff stopping our cat jumping on my head just after I’ve fallen asleep, then with data or no data, I’d buy one tomorrow.
  1. De Porter et al. (2014) Proceedings of the ACVB/AVSAB Veterinary Behaviour Symposium pp 17-18
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