Hello everyone, I recently adopted a male cat two years old from the shelter. He is super friendly and we do love him however, there have been a lot of issues with him. Our biggest issue is that it seems like he has pica. I will list below what we have done to remedy the issue and correct the behavior.
We have put cord protectors around all the wires in the house with aluminum foil around it and bitter apple spray we completely remodeled our bedroom to be cat proof, including our bathroom. We have three intense play sessions to tire him out one in the morning, one in the midday when I get back from school or work and one at night before bed, he also gets supervised outside time and plenty of love and affection. He always has a clean litter box freshwater, and full food bowl. We also got him freeze dried anchovies to hopefully try and soothe the chewing compulsions and some rubber toys, which he doesn’t seem too interested in unless it is a wire, a finger or any kind of jewelry or soft foamy texture.
We have been OK with pica or I guess since we don’t know it is for sure pica we have been trying our best and we were OK with it, but I believe that we are wearing our patients thin since he had started biting at us, which was OK at first and we did try our best to redirect, but now it is getting to a point where last night he bit through my fiancé‘s hand when he was sleeping to the point where he bled and also bit my engagement ring so hard that it broke. I was obviously very upset over my ring however, I do understand that he is just an animal and I just put him up in the bathroom with his litter box, food water, and toys. And left the house to cool off for some hours.
The advice I am looking for is we don’t know if it would be appropriate to keep him in the bathroom overnight with plenty of food , litter, toys, water, and to basically only have him in our bedroom during day time unless we do limited supervised time in the living room since the living room is not kitty proofed or if it would be more appropriate to take him back to the shelter so he could be rehomed with someone possibly more capable of caring for him we really do love him and I just want to the most humane and ethical thing for him so he can live a happy life.