Originally posted by Peaches:
<STRONG>I really really really want to know how long it took Kitty to become relaxed and happy.</STRONG>
Peaches,

It's really different for each cat. It's not unusual, from what I have read, for a cat to hide for the first few days or even weeks s/he's in a new home. It sounds like your cat will probably loosen up, since he will at least allow you to pet him sometimes. I think the important thing is positive reinforcement and not scaring the cat by forcing attention on him when he doesn't want it.

I haven't had an extremely shy cat, but I read some advice in a book by Nicholas Dodman called "The Cat Who Cried for Help" that sounds like good advice to me if your cat persists in his shyness.

He suggests systematic desensitization to whatever the cat is afraid of (in this case, people). "... [A]pprehension is reduced at each level of exposure to the stimulus by avoiding the negative consequences previously associated with it."

What he did was to wait until the cat was somewhere it felt comfortable, then join her in that room and close the door. He and his wifre would sit down on a couch on the other side of the room from the cat with a bag of cat treats. (They'd make sure the cat hadn't just been fed.)

"Step one was to allow Cinder [his cat] tp desensitize to ur presence from her vantage point under the furniture," he says. "We literally just sat there and read, hour after hour, night after night. Prior to each session I would slide a food treat across the floor, trying to get it provocatively positioned a foot or so from Cinder's retreat."

After a week of this, the cat put a paw out to get the treat, and in several weeks the cat was becoming more confident in getting treats that landed a little farther away, "although she would scuttle back to safety quickly once in possession of the spoils." But "[e]ventually she became almost blase about retrieval, porgressively gaining in confidence to the point where she would take treats from the couch text to us and ultimately from our hands. ... [A]fter that it was only a matter of time before she would sit on our laps to be petted."

He says the whole process took several months, with about a month between each stage.