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Training your cat to do tricks
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Cats can be trained to do tricks on request
One of the persistent myths about cats is that they can’t be trained to do tricks. Dog owners will tell you it’s because cats aren’t as smart as dogs. Or maybe it’s that they’re smarter than dogs. Or perhaps it’s that they’re just too independent to care very much about pleasing you. Regardless of the explanation offered, though, it simply isn’t true. While dogs are pack animals that naturally want to please the pack leader (you) and are, as a result, fairly easy to train, it takes a little bit more work to train a cat to do a trick. Nevertheless, with a little patience and a lot of love your cat will soon be doing something adorable on request.
Most websites that discuss teaching tricks to cats advise using food (sometimes with a clicker or other sound to fill in for treats) in order to reward the behavior you want. But most cat treats are full of unnecessary calories and often unnatural fillers and sweeteners, as well, and many cat experts disapprove strongly of creating an association between food and behaviors not related to an animal’s survival. There is, however, something that your cat craves more than treats and it can be just as effective at modifying her behavior. That something is love and attention, and dispensed in ample amounts and at the right time, they work just as well as, if not better than, treats and cost less, to boot.
Providing your animal with positive reinforcement, whether in the form of food or love, is an example of a psychological concept known as operant conditioning. An operant learning sequence has three components: an antecedent, a behavior and a consequence. The antecedent is the cue or command, i.e., a hand signal or a verbal command, that tells an animal to perform a certain behavior, e.g, to sit or roll over. The sitting or the rolling over is what we call the behavior. The consequence is what happens after the behavior occurs, and is affected by something known as Thorndike’s Law of Effect, which states that if a consequence is pleasant (i.e., reward), the preceding behavior will become more frequent, and if a consequence is unpleasant (i.e., punishment) the behavior becomes less likely to occur. So how does this help us teach a cat to do tricks?
Step one is to provide positive reinforcement when your cat engages in behavior that you want, although you should be aware that your cat is probably not going to be sensitive to context and will think you want her to engage in such behavior all the time. Accordingly, make sure you choose a trick you don’t mind her doing at inconvenient times. For instance, let’s say you want to teach your cat to stand up and walk on her hind legs on command. Whenever you see her standing up on her hind legs, you would immediately give her a treat or scratch her under the chin or wherever she likes and say “good kitty” in a friendly and positive voice. After a week or two, you will probably notice that she is standing on her hind legs more often in an attempt to get her reward. Reward her consistently while she is engaged in the behavior you want, not afterward. When she is doing this regularly, you can move her along to learning the full trick by withholding the reward most of the time unless she also takes a step forward while standing on two legs. When she does this, give her the treat and/or the physical and verbal encouragement, until she is taking a step every time she stands up on both legs. Eventually you will move on to withholding the reward unless she is taking a couple of steps, and so on, until she is doing the full trick every time. At that point, it won’t be necessary to give her the reward every time she does the trick. Intermittent reinforcement will be sufficient.
The final step is to teach kitty to associate the trick with a verbal cue or hand signal. While she is doing her trick, say or show her the cue you want her to learn as a command. At first this will probably confuse her, and she may stop doing her trick. Wait until she is once again doing her trick before you repeat the command. Eventually she will come to associate the command with the trick and, by extension, the reward, and will perform the trick when you want her to.
Keep in mind that some cats will be easier to train than others, and it will always be easier to train your cat to do on command something she is already doing on her own. And if you and your cat don’t have the patience to learn to do tricks, let it go. After all… one of the things we love about cats is their apparent independence and the fact that they’re the ones who have us trained.
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