Adopted a 7 year old and he has now lived under our bed for eleven days. Is this normal or did we get it wrong?

Adopted Barney a week and a half ago. Seven years old, was in the rescue for four months, described on his card as "confident and affectionate" which I am beginning to think was written about a different cat.

He went straight under our bed on day one and has essentially stayed there. He eats, but only overnight. Litter tray is being used, again overnight. I've seen him properly twice, both times at about 4am when I got up and he shot back under. My husband has not seen him at all except as a shape.

We have a spare room set up beautifully for him with a cat tree and everything, and he has no interest in it whatsoever, so that money went well. No other pets, no children, quiet house.

The bit that's getting to me is that I don't know whether to leave him completely alone, which feels like ignoring him, or to sit in the room and talk to him, which feels like harassment. Eleven days feels long. Everything I read says a few days.

Eleven days is nothing for an adult rescue, genuinely. The "few days" figure you keep reading is a kitten figure. Adults who've been through a shelter often work in weeks.

He's eating and using the tray. Those are the two boxes that actually matter, and he's ticking both. Everything else is him deciding whether you're safe.

Sit in the room but do not look at him and do not talk to him at first. Read a book out loud if you want noise, or just be boring. Eye contact from a big new animal is a lot. I read three novels at my rescue over about a month and the day she came out I nearly cried into the paperback.

Also, and I say this gently, the beautiful spare room is for you. Cats pick their own safe spot and it's usually somewhere small and dark that we would never choose. Under your bed IS the safe room, he's just chosen the one with you in it, which is arguably a compliment.

Ours took five weeks to come downstairs and about four months before he'd sit on anyone. He is now the cat who screams at me for breakfast at 5am and walks across my face. There is genuinely no relationship between how bad the first fortnight is and how it ends up.

Denise, I've settled a few of these and the pattern you're describing is the standard one, not a warning sign. Eating and toileting on their own schedule while staying out of sight is a cat managing his own fear competently, which is the stage before he starts testing whether he needs to.

On your actual question, leave alone or sit with him: the answer that worked best for me is neither of those exactly. Be present and predictable, but boring, and let him control the distance. Same times each day, same route around the house, food down and then you walk away. I stopped trying to coax entirely after my second rescue taught me that coaxing is pressure with a nice voice on top. What moved things fastest was feeding a little earlier each night so his overnight window crept forwards into a time I happened to be sitting in the room, doing nothing much.

A couple of things worth adding: don't pull him out from under the bed for any reason short of a genuine emergency, because you only get to be the person who does that once. And if he ever stops eating or stops using the tray, that changes the picture from settling to something to ring the vet about. The site's guides to bringing home a rescue cat and cat anxiety and stress set out the stages and the points where it stops being ordinary hiding.

Four months in a shelter is a long time for an adult cat. He is not broken and you have not got it wrong. He's just doing the whole thing at his speed.

smudgesmum said:

the beautiful spare room is for you

This turned out to be completely correct and mildly humbling.

Three weeks now. He comes out in the evenings if we stay on the sofa and don't make a thing of it, sits in the doorway watching telly with us from six feet away, and goes back under when we move. I moved his food bowl about a metre out from under the bed every few days, which took a fortnight and one setback when a delivery driver knocked.

Still hasn't let either of us touch him. But he blinked at me on Tuesday and I have thought about it a lot since.

The doorway stage is a real stage. Enjoy it, because in six months you'll be complaining about a cat who won't get off your keyboard and this thread will read like it was about someone else's animal.