Me and my SO had a fall out tonight - about the cat - again.

We have two cats, one we’ve had a while and he loves her to bits and one we had from a kitten last year. The younger one is a ball of energy (obviously) and she has caused a bit of damage to a couple of things in the house but if I see her messing with something she shouldn’t I always shoo her away from it.

My SO has taken a HUGE disliking to her. He’ll deliberately make sudden movements to frighten her, he’ll approach her with his arms wide etc (which to a small animal emphasises the fact that he’s much bigger). He constantly moans about the fact that she’s a ‘little shit’ and refers to her as ‘that little fucker’.

We’ve had a conversation (more than once) about trying to take things slow and improving his relationship so we don’t have all this stress but his stupidity gets the better of him and he teases her each time as we always go back to square one.

He had another verbal outburst about the cat this evening and my reaction was a case of “I’ve had enough of this I don’t know what to do”.

It doesn’t help that I’m currently 7 weeks pregnant and already hella emotional but it upsets me so much that he has so little patience for an animal that has no idea what’s it’s done wrong when he goes out of his way to scare her. It’s not like he doesn’t like animals, he loves our older cat and is great with her.

Does anyone else out there have a partner like this? How did you tackle your issues? I feel like the only way to resolve this (for him) is to rehome her but I really don’t want to do that, I’m a firm believer that a commitment to a pet is a commitment for that pets life but drastic as it may sound I’m starting to fear that this it will end up being at the cost of my relationship.

I feel so sad 😞 I honestly don’t know how to fix this