Bengal stress-grooming after new cat?

Stress-grooming in a Bengal after a new cat arrives is a real warning sign — Bengals are high-drive cats with strong territorial instincts, and over-grooming tells you the anxiety is already having a physical outlet. Cat anxiety is genuinely easy to miss until it gets to this point, because cats hide stress so well. The good news is that three weeks in is still early enough to turn this around before it becomes entrenched. Can you tell me a bit more — where in the house is your Bengal doing most of the grooming, and has the second cat been fully integrated or are they still mostly separated?

That's really useful. The sofa is almost certainly where your Bengal feels his territory is most under threat — even with the gate, he can hear and smell the new cat, and that core safe space feeling is gone. A few things I want to understand before I point you at a product: is the grooming focused on one area of his body, like the belly or inner legs, or is it more generalised? And has he eaten and used the litter tray normally through all of this?

Good — normal eating and litter habits mean you're not in crisis territory yet, but belly and inner-leg grooming is a classic anxiety pattern and it does tend to escalate if the underlying stress isn't addressed. The restlessness before the grooming is him trying to cope and not finding a way through. What you need here is a pheromone product specifically designed for multi-cat tension, not just general calming. There's an important distinction: standard Feliway Classic mimics the facial pheromone cats use to mark safe spaces, but what you actually want is Feliway Friends, which replicates the cat appeasing pheromone that mother cats produce with kittens — it's the one proven to reduce conflict and stress between cats sharing a home.

The product I'd go with is the Feliway Friends 30-Day Starter Kit — it's a plug-in diffuser and it's widely available on Amazon UK. Plug it in the living room, as close to that sofa as the socket layout allows, and leave it running continuously. One diffuser covers roughly 70 square metres, so a single unit should handle the living room well. Give it a full two weeks before you judge whether it's working — pheromone products aren't immediate, they build up in the environment. While it's running, keep the separation in place but try to give your Bengal some predictable one-on-one time in that room each day so he starts re-associating it with safety rather than threat. Don't rush the introduction process just because you've started the diffuser.

Just the one Feliway Friends diffuser in the living room for now — that's the right call. The pheromone it releases affects both cats, so you don't need to treat them separately. If in a few weeks the new cat is also showing signs of stress in the hallway side, you could consider a second diffuser there, but don't layer too many products at once. The real work here is the slow, controlled introduction running in parallel: scent swapping, feeding on either side of the gate, short visual contact sessions. The diffuser reduces the baseline anxiety so that process is more likely to go smoothly. If the grooming hasn't improved at all after three to four weeks, it's worth a vet check just to rule out a skin cause, but from what you've described this reads clearly as stress-related.