Think Cats Can’t Learn Tricks? Think Again!
The Spring, 2009 issue of UC Davis Magazine featured an article that may be of interest to readers of the Vet Blog.
Sit, Kitty! Stay!
Playing fetch — it’s not just for dogs anymore.
Sit, roll over, shake hands — and this coming from an animal that takes 20-hour naps? At the UC Davis Companion Animal Behavior Service, you can learn how to train your cat just like a person would train a dog.
“Some people have a notion that cats are aloof or unfriendly,” said Melissa Bain, assistant professor of veterinary medicine and epidemiology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, “but they’re not!” Bain, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist, has trained her own cats at home for the past 10 years. “It’s not mainstream, and most people haven’t done it, but that doesn’t mean they can’t,” Bain said.
She said in the past, she’s seen cats play fetch, roll over, get in a box and shake hands, to name a few tricks. This is opposed to the usual tricks cats perform on a daily basis — eat, sleep and shed fur. And while animal trainers in Hollywood have been training cats for decades, this is a fairly new phenomenon for the common cat.
According to Bain, it’s important to use positive reinforcement when training cats, like rewarding them with treats, instead of punishing them, which makes them much less likely to want to participate in the training process. She also uses “clicking training” to help her cat recognize what she wants him to do. “It’s not magic — the clicker is a tool, and it can’t be used as punishment unless you throw it at them,” she said.
When I was a child I made a concerted attempt to train my cat to perform tricks. I can’t remember what tricks I wanted to teach her, but I do know that my attempts at cat training failed miserably. Obviously Dr. Bain has better credentials than I!
Photo: Lily gives five.
You have questions. 
In high school I had a cat who LOVED playing fetch (without having been trained!), and I taught him to sit and jump up while he was really young. Unfortunately he was hit by a car and is no longer with us, but he was definitely the one of the coolest cats I’ve come across. He was extremely intelligent; in fact, I’m sure he learned fetch from just watching our dogs. I think it just takes more time and patience to train cats because they are such independent thinkers – and maybe that’s why it seems so much more interesting when I see a cat do tricks.
Tricks I do on command: sit, come, stay, lie down, settle down (lie down and watch, staying in one place), up, make friends (go up to another animal and sniff or touch noses), go over (to someone), ask (put my paw up to ask for petting), walk with (”heel” on my leash). A couple of them are shown on the videos on my pet page.
I’m not a professional animal trainer, but it seems most likely to me that the reason cats are generally regarded as untrainable is that they would be highly unresponsive to the more “traditional” (i.e., coercive) methods used for training dogs. The laws of learning are expeirimentally proven to be highly effective on pretty much everything from lizards and fish right on up to, and including, us humans. These laws certainly apply to cats as well as dogs, but the very first time an aversive stimulus is applied to a cat, the cat is going to get the heck out of dodge, precluding the possibility of any further training. It’s much easier to hold their attention with treats or other positive reinforcements! Cats also seem to me to have a significantly shorter attention span than most dogs, so I’d expect training cats to require much tighter timing, hence the utility of the clicker.
In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of any animal other than a dog that would routinely put up with the type and volume of punishment that they have routinely been subjected to in the name of training. Dogs also seem to “get it”, more or less, even with relatively sloppy timing on the part of the trainer, and even when the training is made decidedly less than fun for them. The fact that dogs are so ridiculously tolerant of us, and so exquisitely tuned in to us is pretty readily explained by the fact that they are the product of a few 10,000s of years or so of human-mediated evolution (i.e., “unnatural selection”), selecting for traits that we humans like. In contrast we’ve only been “working” on cats for a few thousand years, and possibly not selecting for traits that would lead to a readily trainable animal. Maybe in the year 22009 cats will be as easy to train as dogs!
For an excellent intro to the principles and applications of the laws of learning check out “Don’t Shoot the Dog!” by Karen Pryor. The title notwithstanding, it’s really not a dog training book, but rather an intro to the nuts and bolt of teaching/learning across the animal kingdom (or at least across the Vertabrata). I actually find some of the most amusing anecdotes and examples are those involving the training of humans!
[...] Think Cats Can’t Learn Tricks? Think Again!: “ [...]
Magee has been amenable to training- she plays fetch.
I also had a cat (now in the Bridge) who knew “sit” and “shake”.
Both of these felines had also taught themselves to open doors, windows and cabinets.
Magee’s brother, Colby, knows “lie down” and “roll over”
So yes, cats can be taught- you just have to convince them it is worth their while.
All my cats have been taught basic obedience and some tricks as well. Each cat seeming to pick from the menu (so to speak) his/her own repertoire of tricks. The cat I have now is the smartest cat I’ve encountered to date and has taught me creative and innovative training techniques to use with future/other cats. I’ve even found some of Cesar Millan’s techniques work with him …for certain aspects. Of course, I had to tweak them a bit to make them apply to cats, but they do work.
However, as to the “short attention span” that some say cats have …I disagree. I have watched cats focused on hunting/stalking and I have seen them commit HOURS to the hole or regular “stomping grounds” of a particular animal or group of animals. I would have to say this proves that they indeed do have a VERY LONG attention span.
The trick is to make the reward for longer focus on you worth their while, because as solo trouble-shooters and hunters, they have a short “interest in coordinating their efforts with others.”