Question
We have a two-and-a-half-year-old Maine Coon dude who really enjoys the food he can get. As I'm having good results clicker training my dog, I'm trying to find time to exercise my cat and teach him some cool behaviours.
Some tricks I thought about, but maybe not in the correct order are: (1) follow a target (a pen), (2) sit, (3) go in your tunnel, and (4) get in a box.
With dogs, it is quite clear where to start; I don't know what works well with cats, so how should I start his training?
Answer
It's definitely possible to train cats, you just have to take a bit more patience with them and try not to use the same methods as you would with a dog. Cats don't have the attention span for training sessions that dogs do, so it's much more effective to passively train them to do things you want. Thinking about it at the basic level, all training is an association between a command and a behaviour. So if you see behaviour that you want to develop into something they will do on command, reinforce it as much as possible.
For example, my big cat will come to me whenever I rub my hands together. He does that because whenever I pet him, I will rub my hands or fingers together first, so hearing that sound means that he is going to get attention. It's evolved on its own now, where he'll jump up at my hand to pull it closer to him if I don't pet him right away when he comes.
Now that's dependent on my big cat being a sucker for attention. My small cat doesn't care for attention unless she initiates it, so despite me trying the same things with her, the best I can do is get her attention.
Sitting is pretty easy, it's the one command that you can train them to do similar to training a dog. I simply worked on it each morning before I gave them food. As soon as they sat, they got food.
I don't really know how to get started with following a target, but getting them to go to a certain place is fairly straightforward. Hold your cat while you put some food or a treat that he really likes down in the place you want him to go to when you tell him. Take him a couple steps back and let him go. As he goes to get the food, you'll want to say your command. Simply associate your command with going to get a tasty snack in that place.
As he starts to catch what's going on, you can start working on setting the treat down while he can't see it, and give him the command to go to the treat. Once you have it established that your command means go to the place and he gets a treat, you can start saying the command when there isn't a treat sometimes. I think that cats lose interest in following direction if they aren't praised after each time.
A solution to where you don't have to place a treat down beforehand, is to work in where he comes back to you for the treat. That way you can tell him to go, and then tell him to come for his treat after he's done that.
Answered By - Spidercat
