The introduction went slowly and it worked. The adult cat and the kitten share the whole flat while you are home, they sleep in the same room some afternoons, and every so often the adult gets too wound up and chases the kitten under the sofa. Then you leave for work and shut the kitten in her own room again, because you have no idea what the chasing looks like when nobody is there to break it up.
Almost everyone asks whether the chasing has to stop first. It usually does not. Plenty of adult cats chase a younger cat on and off for years and it never becomes anything. The signs worth watching are about what happens after a tense moment, not whether tense moments happen at all.
| Looks worrying, usually fine | Worth waiting on |
|---|---|
| A chase that ends by itself after a few seconds | A chase that ends with one cat pinned in a corner |
| The kitten goes straight back to pestering the adult | The kitten avoids the room the adult is in |
| Hissing once, then both walk off | One cat stops eating, or eats only when the other is gone |
| Wrestling with pauses and swapped roles | One cat always on top, the other always trying to leave |
| The chased cat jumps somewhere high and it stops there | The chased cat has nowhere to go and the adult follows |
Escape routes do a lot of the work. A shelf, a cat tree or the top of a wardrobe that the kitten can reach and the adult bothers less with turns most chases into nothing. Separate food, water and litter spots in more than one room help the same way. Sort those out before the first absence, not after it.
You cannot learn what they do alone by watching them while you are home, because half of what stops a chase is you looking up. So the honest test is a short absence with a camera running. An errand, an hour or so, with an old phone propped on a shelf recording the room they spend the most time in.
Watch it when you get back. If the recording is boring, and most are, make the next absence longer: a morning, then a half day, then a full workday. If you see a chase that ends with one cat stuck and the other not letting go, go back a step and give the escape routes another look before trying again.
For this first trial, plain video beats anything clever. Any phone records video with its own camera app. What you want is the whole hour, including the dull parts, so you can see whether the chase was the only thing that happened or the start of something.
Once the short absences look fine, the question changes. You are not trying to study them anymore, you want to know during the day that nothing is off. Scrolling through eight hours of footage every evening is not something anyone keeps doing for long.
AI Vision Monitor answers that second question. It takes a still photograph on a schedule from a spare phone or a camera you already own, compares it with a sentence you wrote, and tells you when the sentence matches. The sentences are about where the cats are, because that is what a photograph can show:
None of these tells you much on its own. Together over a week they show whether the kitten spends her day hiding up high or sprawled on the sofa, which is most of what you wanted to know.
Checks are paid one at a time instead of monthly. The starter pack is 2000 credits for 2.99 euro, a check on the light model costs half a credit, and new accounts get 50 free credits without a card.
| Schedule | Checks per day | Credits per day (light) | A month of workdays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every 15 minutes, nine hour workday | 36 | 18 | about 59 cents |
| Every 30 minutes, nine hour workday | 18 | 9 | about 30 cents |
| Twice a day, lunch and mid afternoon | 2 | 1 | about 3 cents |
Do I have to wait until the chasing stops? Usually not. Watch whether it ends by itself and whether the chased cat has somewhere to go.
How long should the first absence be? An hour or so, recorded. Then longer each time the recording comes back boring.
Should I still separate them at night? That is the same test. Once a couple of recorded daytime absences look calm, a night is just a longer one.
Can a camera warn me about a fight while I am at work? Not reliably. A scheduled photograph shows where the cats are, not what happened between two checks.
If the phone is going to live on a shelf for this anyway, the page on turning an old phone into a cat camera covers the setup itself. If the bill is the question, the cost per day arithmetic has its own page.
Do the short recorded absences first. When they come back dull, prop the same phone where it sees the cat tree, write one sentence about where you hope to find the kitten, and let it check every 15 minutes while you are out.
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