When I call, Hamish, my cat he comes running! If you aren’t aware of the prevailing belief that cats are untrainable, a cat coming when beckoned doesn’t sound radical or particularly clever. But for many, many people who believe it’s impossible to train a cat, this is nothing short of miraculous. When cat-training-doubters visit my house, its rather gratifying to see their amazement when he comes rocketing across the back yard and launches himself through the doorway.
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I’ve had cats most of my life. The first one was a part Persian long-hair kitten my sister acquired on the sly. It didn’t take long for my mother to discover the source of the bleating noise in my sister’s bedroom. Though she swore she wasn’t taking care of any animals, my mother crumbled pretty quickly. Pierre Elliot Trudeau (it was 1967) was part of our family for 19 years. I would like to say I helped with training him but mostly I interfered. I was 4.
The Carrot and The Stick
I once heard someone declare that you could only train a cat with ‘the carrot’ meaning by treats and positive reinforcement. If you tried to use ‘the stick’ the cat would ignore you or run away. It sounded good and I have to admit I may have repeated it a few times. After two cat-less years, we adopted a kitten, the training process started, and I remembered that statement. Here’s the correction: getting a cat to do something requires ‘the carrot’, getting a cat to stop doing something does require ‘the stick’.
For example, if you want cats to stay off of your counter tops and kitchen table, getting up on these surfaces has to be associated with something unpleasant. The first step is to run towards them shouting one word and clapping your hands. Please don’t start reasoning or explaining, they are not teenagers. DOWN is my word of choice and I repeat it at top volume until they are well clear of the forbidden area. DOWN (always shouted) becomes the word they associate with unpleasant behaviour from their human. A spray bottle filled with water, one that isn’t used for anything else, should be employed a few times. Getting wet added to the loud noises and agitated human reinforces the unpleasantness. Leave the water bottle on the forbidden space until they stop going there.
Human Training
Here’s the human training part. Be brief. If you chase the cat all over the house, it will just think you are a lunatic and not associate the unpleasantness with a specific area. Be consistent. Everyone in the household needs to follow the same routine, or the cat will learn to avoid a human (the shouter) but not an area. And be realistic. If you leave the butter on the counter overnight, you are sending mixed signals. If the cat is allowed in every room of your house but not on any of the furniture, the scope of your ‘no go zone’ is too big and too complicated.
My mother didn’t think animals belonged in the house. Her compromise was to only allow our outdoor cat into the kitchen, where he had a bed, food and water. It might seem like a big task to impress this territorial restriction, but it came down to one tightly focused area with one required behaviour – don’t go through this doorway. Making that specific space unpleasant (the area just across the threshold) was simple to do. Training the cat was easy. The hard part was to keep us kids from carrying him to our rooms. The cat was well aware this was forbidden. We kids were a little slower on the uptake.
Positive Reinforcement
Getting a cat to do something you want is a little harder and only involves positive reinforcement – the carrot. I wanted our new cat, Hamish, to come when I called him. We live in an area rife with coyotes and missing cat posters. I wanted to be able to call him at dusk and know he was safe in the house during the predator-filled night. First, I taught him his name. Name is a bit conceptual to a cat so let’s say I wanted a word he associated with himself. I would repeat ‘Hamish’ over and over while I gave him affection, stopping the former when he’d had enough of the latter. I never said any other words at that time. And I did feel a bit silly. When he started going outside, he was on a harness with a 15 metre rope. Every time I carried him back into the house, I gave him a treat, shaking the bag vigorously and saying his name. Soon, I just had to open the door, call him and shake the bag. Then, I called him, didn’t shake the bag, but still gave a treat. When this was 95% successful, the harness came off. I called him every couple of hours just to reinforce the behaviour. Et voila! I have a cat that comes when called. He still gets the occasional treat but that’s mostly because I’m soft. The behaviour is now ingrained.
Again, it’s up to the human to be consistent and have a feel for when you can move to each step. Just don’t make negative associations around the behaviour you want. Don’t call the cat for a pill or a nail clipping; don’t do unpleasant tasks around the door, or within 15 or 20 minutes of coming inside.
Cat Training vs. Dog Training
Again, be realistic. Cat’s have less capacity for non-situational behaviours than dogs. If I went four houses down the street and called my dog, he would come to me. If I called the cat, he would go to the house we live in, or maybe come close enough to see me but not come to the strange door. It would be confusing and weaken the behaviour. Cats aren’t laser-focused on their human; we are part of their ecosystem and they need consistency in that system. If I start calling the cat from different places in the neighbourhood, the cat would have to decide if he was required to go to me or to the door he always goes to. It’s a big decision and, oh look, there’s a squirrel…
Another part of being realistic is limiting the number of behaviours you want to prevent or encourage. There is a border collie in England that has demonstrated it understands 300 unique words. Your cat is not going to compete with that. It can’t or won’t or some of both. Think of them as having a small amount of brain space for you and what you want, and the rest is occupied with instinct and independence.
So, why even bother? It seems like a lot of work! In my case, I wanted to protect Hamish from danger and myself from worry. Years ago, we lived on a busier road and our cat was trained to stay away from it. It involved lots of shouting ‘CAR MONSTER’ every time a vehicle went by during the outside training time, and we truly looked like idiots, jumping around on the sidewalk, but that cat died of old age. It’s worth trying keeping them safe.
Why can’t a cat just be left to do whatever it wants, especially an indoor cat? Well, it’s still an arrangement where I provide a lot of benefits for some adjustments on the cat’s part. I want to be comfortable with housing this animal and for me that means, my food preparation area is cat-free. For someone else, it’s being able to sit on a fur-free sofa. I want visitors to be comfortable in my house, and not have a cat jump on their dinner plate. When a non-cat person (there are some) sees that this isn’t a frighteningly unpredictable wild animal, that there is some relationship and communication between human and feline, and that their food is free of fur, they soften a little. And that’s not a bad thing.
