Her home hiding map will not transfer literally to a cattery pen, and pretending otherwise wastes the one document that could help staff read her. She will not have her wardrobe, her airing cupboard, or the space under your bed, but she will have the same instincts that chose those places, and those instincts, described well, are what cattery staff actually need from you. The update before a first stay is therefore a translation again: from locations at home to behavior in a pen, written for people who will meet her at her most guarded and must judge, within a day or two, whether her hiding is ordinary settling or something that needs attention.
Translating Locations Into Behavior
Send the list to the cattery in writing before check-in, and confirm the booking's agreed terms in writing at the same time, covering the stay, any additional care she needs, and who authorizes a vet visit if staff become worried about her. In the list itself, keep the home record visible, her usual sleeping and hiding spots, room by room, any new favorites, and the places she must never be shut into, including cupboards and the garage, because it shows staff the pattern behind her choices: a cat who always seeks height hides differently from a cat who always seeks enclosure. Then add the translation staff will use hourly. Say how she hides when she is stressed, whether she presses into the smallest enclosed corner, faces the wall, or freezes in the open, how she responds to a voice, whether food left quietly near her works better than attention, and how long she typically takes to start eating and emerging after a change at home. That last detail, her ordinary timescale, is the gift a first stay most needs, because it stops normal caution being read as decline and stops real decline being excused as shyness.
What to Pack So the Pen Can Become a Hiding Place
A pen becomes manageable for a hiding cat when it contains one proper refuge, and most catteries welcome owners providing the familiar layer that makes that refuge smell right. Ask what the cattery allows, then send bedding she has slept on at home, unwashed, so her own scent arrives with her, and tell staff which item matters most to her so it is never removed for washing at the same time as everything else. Mention on the list whether she hides under cover or inside a box at home, because staff can then arrange the pen her way, a covered bed for a burrower, a high shelf with a blanket for a climber, instead of discovering her preference by trial. Note also how she behaves when she is lifted or reached for in a hiding place, since staff will need to handle her for checks, and a cat who tolerates being scooped from a bed but panics when grabbed from a box is safer in everyone's hands once that is written down.
After the Stay, Her Map Gains a New Kind of Entry
Ask staff, when you collect her, how she actually used the pen: where she spent her first day, when she began eating, and whether she chose the shelf, the bedding, or the corner you did not predict. Add that report to the list as its first away-from-home entry, dated, because the next cattery, or the same one next year, deserves to start from what she did rather than what you forecast. If she settled faster than expected, record that plainly too, since owners tend to preserve their worries and discard their reassurances, and a balanced list serves her better. Over time these entries build a picture of how portable her sense of safety is, which informs everything from future boarding choices to how you prepare her for a house move. Keeping the cattery version and the home map side by side in Pet Passport, the packet KinsLe maintains for her, means whichever stay comes next begins with the right document already written.