Hiding is normal. The question that matters is whether this is how your cat has always been, or whether something changed.
The feline environmental needs guidelines, written jointly by the American Association of Feline Practitioners and International Cat Care, put it plainly.
Hiding is a coping behavior that cats display in response to stressful situations and when they want to avoid interactions with other cats, animals or people.
The American Animal Hospital Association says the same thing in its behavior guidelines: cats hide as a normal coping behavior in response to a stressful situation. So a cat under the bed because there are visitors, or because a new cat moved in, is doing the thing cats do.
The same guidelines set out five pillars of a healthy environment for a cat, and the first one is a safe place. Not a nice extra. The first one.
For a cat, a safe place is a private and secure area, often in a raised location. These features give the cat a sense of enclosure, isolation or seclusion. A safe place is one that a cat can retreat to so that it feels protected.
What counts is smaller than people expect. The guidelines name a cardboard box on its side, because it gives a roof and an easy way in. They also note that in a house with more than one cat, a hiding place should have two ways in, so the other cat cannot sit in the doorway and trap them.
Two shelter studies gave newly arrived cats a hiding box and compared them with cats who had none. In a randomized trial published in 2019, the cats with a box settled faster, reaching a lower stress score seven days earlier than the cats without one. An earlier study in 2014 found the same pattern in the first days after arrival. A hiding place is not indulgence. It measurably shortens how long a cat stays stressed.
A cat who has always disappeared when the doorbell goes is a cat with a personality. The signals worth taking seriously are changes.
The pain guidelines are blunt about why this gets missed. Pain has traditionally been under-recognized in cats, they say, and the signs in this species may be subtle. A cat in pain does not usually cry. It goes quiet and goes away.
Researchers at the University of Montreal built the Feline Grimace Scale, which scores five things in a cat's face: the ears, the tightening around the eyes, the tension in the muzzle, the whiskers and the position of the head. It was validated against another established pain measure in 2019. A second study in 2021 tested it on cat owners rather than vets, and found owners scored cats consistently enough to be useful. It is for sudden pain rather than long-term arthritis, and it does not replace a vet, but it is something you can do at home tonight.
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