Home ground

The cat next door

My cats have come to a truce with Tiddles, the cat next door. When we moved in Tiddles and my crew had a few close encounters of the hissy kind but they soon worked out some compromises. Most cats prefer to avoid fights if they possibly can and use one or more olfactory signals to mark their territories.
Tiddles and my three skirt around each other in shared zones - the front gardens of both houses, the paddock across the road - and avoid each others' inner territories.
My cats still regularly mark their territory by scratching the fence post between the houses and Tiddles marks one of the trees with urine occasionally. Cleo used to defecate on that side of our house as a signal to Tiddles, but thankfully has stopped that now.
We rarely hear any warning hisses from the cats now that they've worked out their territorial limits.