Dale Galiniak - Training the Best Cat Ever: 18 Cat and Kitten Clicker Training Tricks

Copyright 2013 Dale Galiniak

Published by Dale Galiniak at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my girlfriend Vickie, withoutwhose help and encouragement, this book would never been a reality.I would also like to thank my roommate Jordan and his catPipsqueek, who was the second cat I tried a lot of these trickswith, the Shedd Aquariums Marine Mammal department, who seemed tonever get annoyed by a volunteer asking a million questions aboutanimal training, and because of which, whose lingo make up a largepart of this book, and the readers of the /r/dogtraining and/r/cattraining subreddits, who were always willing for me to bounceideas off of.

And most of all, Puck, who really is the best catever.

Introduction

People will enjoy telling you that training a cat isimpossible. They will say that its a pointless endeavor and awaste of your time. And if you attempt to train a cat the way mostpeople attempt to train their dogs, using outdated techniques thatare based on fear and punishment, they will be right. But withpatience and the correct techniques, you will find the process tobe fun and easy.

Cat training is more than just having yourcat perform fun tricks, its also a practical and systematic way toteach him to be a better housemate, how to accept and activelyengage in cat-care, like claw trimming and brushing. Its a way tokeep you cat engaged, keeping him active. And most of all, its achance to bond, and create a stronger relationship

The Basis of Cat Training

The foundation of teaching cats toperform tricks and husbandry behaviors is operantconditioning. Operant conditioning is learning which behaviorsare altered by the consequences that follow them. If your cat doessomething that you like, like stand on his hind legs, or sit stillwhile you brush him, so you give him a treat afterwards, he islikely to perform that behavior more readily in the future.Likewise, if your cat tries to jump in the shower with you and getssprayed with water, he is likely to not perform that behavior againin the future. All of these are examples of your cat performing abehavior and then learning from their consequences, either to dothat thing more, or less.

The method that we use here is positivereinforcement. Positive reinforcement is the use of stimulithat the cat finds pleasurable to reinforce the continueddemonstration of the behavior you, as a trainer, want to see. Thisis in contrast to negative reinforcement, which are stimulithat your cat finds unpleasurable to reinforce the avoidance ofbehaviors you dont want to see.

Negative reinforcement works very poorly oncats. As a species, when presented with negative stimuli, theirprimary response is avoidance, not just to the behavior, but to thesituations which cause the negative stimuli, which, in this case,usually means interacting with the trainer. This is the foundationfor why most people assume cats are untrainable. While theres beena movement away from negative reinforcement with dogs in the past20 years, the traditional method of dog training is to use negativereinforcement, whose desire to please the trainer outweighed thedesire to avoid the situation, something that doesnt work so wellwith cats.

In this book, we pull heavily fromadvancements made by the marine mammal training community. Marinemammal trainers were one of the first to deploy positivereinforcement exclusively, mainly out of necessity. Its hard toimpossible to jump into the water and provide negativereinforcement to multiple ton sea animals, so they were forced tocome up with methods of positive reinforcement that could beadministered from the shore. These techniques ended up workingbetter than imagined, and have even started trickling over into thetraining of other animals, including large zoo animals, horses anddogs. And now cats.

Primary and SecondaryReinforcers

Aprimary reinforcer is a stimulus that your cat naturallyfinds stimulating and positive, most commonly due to satisfyingsome inherent biological need, such as food. While both cats anddogs are both strongly food motivated, dogs are much more stronglyattention motivated. You can use a treat to motivate both a cat anda dog, but if you try to use just praise to motivate a cat, youwill find she will quickly lose interest.

A secondary reinforcer is areinforcing stimulus that is taught to the cat by associating itwith with a primary reinforcer. The classical example of asecondary reinforcer is Pavlovs Bell, where the primary reinforceris the food, and the secondary reinforcer is the bell, to thebehavior of salivating.

Bridging Stimulus

A bridgingstimulus, or a bridge, is a special type of secondaryreinforcer that is taught to your cat in order to selectivelyidentify the exact behavior you are trying to reinforce. A bridgetells your cat the exact moment that they did what you wanted themto do.

The reason why you use a bridge, instead ofjust reinforcing a complete trick after it is completed with aprimary reinforcer, is that that can be confusing to your cat. Themore time that passes between the action and the reinforcer, themore confusing it becomes for your cat. She may know that she didsomething correctly, but not know what exactly it was, and willusually believe it was the last thing she did. This can lead tosuperstitious behavior, which is when your cat incorrectlyassociates certain events with getting rewarded.

A bridge can be any gesture or noise thatcan be easily performed that isnt easily confused with normalstimuli your cat may experience in his environment. In myexperience, the best form of bridge for cats is a clicker orwhistle (or an equivalent noise made with your mouth). I wouldadvise against using a spoken word command like good. While wordsare easy to use, it is likely your cat will hear them out ofcontext, which weakens their effect.

The use of a bridge must be precise. If youare teaching your cat to jump over a pole, for example, you wouldwant to perform the bridge at the exact height of their jump,instead of when they land or take off. This helps encourage them toperform the trick in the best possible way.

Building a Bridge

Building a bridge for you cat is easy. Since most cats are fairlystrong opportunistic eaters, its not hard to use that as thefoundation of your training. First find a treat your cat goes crazyover. If you already have a treat you know your cat loves, you areprobably already set. If you dont, I recommend trying a number ofdifferent things. In training my cats, I found finely choppedground beef to be an exceptionally good initial primary motivator,but you may have to try a variety of treats, including ground beef,chicken, cheese, and a variety of store bought treats. You willwant to use what works best for your cat.

Once you found your primary motivator, theprocess is simple: perform the bridge, such as a click, and thengive your cat the treat. Repeat this for five to ten times, andthen repeat this session over the course of a week at least once aday. Very quickly your cat will learn to associate the bridge withthe inevitable treat.

An important thing to keep in mind, onceestablished, your bridge must mean you cat is going to receive atreat. I have seen a number of people attempt to train their cats,and once the bridge has been established, start to slack on givingtheir cat the primary reinforcer. While this may work with dogs,who find affection to be an adequate primary reinforcer, this willnot work on cats. If you become anything less than 100% consistentwith your rewards, your cats performance will very rapidlydegrade