Cat Training

Once, my mom tried to train a litter of rather needy kittens to leave her alone.  First, she tried to overdose them on attention by petting and cuddling them up one side and down the other.  This caused them to follow her around and pester her even more to get some more of that cuddling that they already liked.  Her next attempt at getting a break from them was to put them out when they tried to get her attention.  The result of this was that, unlike our other cats who meowed or pawed at the door when they wanted out, they went and bugged my mom.  When she tried to train them to leave her alone, they trained her to open the door.  She then gave up and got crawled on a lot.

My approach to cat training is a bit different, and I’m happier with the results.  I do not expect classical conditioning (associating behaviors with rewards or punishments) to work on cats; as in my mom’s second attempt to train the cats to leave her alone, a cat can decide that it wants whatever you’re trying to use as a punishment, and in the case of rewards, cats are not like dogs–they are apt to be unimpressed with the reward or otherwise to not really care why you’re giving it to them.  Instead, I set up the cats’ environment so that what I don’t want them to do is inconvenient, impossible, or unpleasant, and what I prefer they do instead is easy, convenient, and enjoyable.

For example, it is common for landlords to prefer that tenants’ pets not tear the heck out of the carpets.  I do not agree with declawing, except for medical reasons, so my cats are not declawed.  My current landlord said “to heck with it, the carpets in there already need replaced anyway” but previous landlords have not been so accommodating.  So, I made the edges of the carpets, which cats do the most damage to, an unpleasant clawing surface with double-sided tape (the sticky feeling annoys them), and provided an alternative attractive clawing surface in the form of a block of corrugated cardboard with catnip rubbed into it.  My cats still took a paw to spots in the middle of the room here and there, but not the same spot over and over, so there was no visible damage; they were able to make a bigger mess with the cardboard shreds, which seemed to make them happy.

There are times when setting up the environment is not sufficient because the cat’s behavior has to do with how it interacts with humans.  One cat in our family gave “love bites”–it used its teeth on people, not hard enough to break the skin or cause pain, but some humans did not like it anyway.  I didn’t mind but I had an idea for how to keep the cat from getting in trouble: whenever it bit me, I tapped it on the forehead with two fingers.  Cats understand this because mother cats use their paw to correct kittens in the same way.  I then said “no bites.”  Before long the cat figured it out and if it started moving its mouth toward someone, they could say “no bites” and it would stop or do something else like rub its face against the person’s arm instead.  If someone thinks they might lose control and tap the cat’s forehead too hard out of anger, they should not use the two-fingered tap technique themselves, but rather tell the other humans in their household about the technique.  It is never supposed to be done anywhere near hard enough to hurt the cat–it is just a tap to get their attention, communicate in cat language, or at worst annoy them.  The same force that you might use to tap on someone’s shoulder is about right.

Squirt bottles are commonly recommended as a cat behavior punishment.  If you choose to use a squirt bottle, aim for their back half rather than their faces, as water that gets into their ears can lead to complications such as ear infections.

If you want your cat to learn to do tricks…good luck.  You may have some success if you convince your cat that it is a game, such as teaching them to “fetch” so you can throw a toy for them to chase some more (this can also be seen as the cat training the human to throw a toy so that they can chase it).  Do not expect them to obey voice commands; they will probably look at you like you’re stupid, and even if this isn’t their usual response, they will do this if you ever try to use their tricks to impress anyone.  I recommend sticking to peaceful, pleasant cohabitation as the goal of cat training instead of trick performance.