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November 21, 2005
Can Cats Learn Tricks?
Many owners believe cats can't or won't learn to do tricks. You have only to watch the cats (the real ones, not the CGI ones) on cat food ads and in movies to realise this is not true. Cats have learnt to jump through hoops, jump from one stool to another and to fetch objects and drop them in a box. A relative's cat learned to fetch a toy of his own choice from his toybox when his elderly owner gave the instruction for play-time (this also kept the floor tidy). Other cats have learnt how to eat food after dipping a paw into a half-full can of cat food, while other cats have learnt this "trick" unaided (pawing food from a container is similar to scooping fish or prizing a mouse from a crevice). The sudden vogue in "clicker training" is for cats as well as dogs.
When teaching cats tricks, the most effective procedure is one that animal trainers call "shaping" and which is used with wild animals. You must break down the teaching process into small incremental steps, where each step is easily mastered. Because cats are easily demotivated, the training session must be set up so the cat has a very high probability of doing the right thing. To start with, you look for something a cat does naturally and which can be shaped into the desired behaviour. Victoria Voith described how a cat was taught to jump over a fly swatter using the stepwise approach. At first, the cat was rewarded for walking over a fly swatter placed on the ground. Once it associated the fly swatter with a food reward, the swatter was held a few inches from the floor and the cat encouraged to step over it for the reward. Each time the cat mastered the new development, the fly swatter was raised until he had to jump over it. Use a hoop instead of a fly swatter and the trick looks even more impressive! Similarly, to teach a cat to jump from stool to stool, first it learns to step from one stool to the next. Over a period of time, the stools are moved further apart until eventually the cat has to jump from one to the other.
Read the rest of this article! Facinating...
Posted by sue at November 21, 2005 09:34 AM
Comments
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Posted by: Samuel Adams at February 18, 2006 12:27 PM