I have been trying to figure out how to instill good behavior in a cat. From what you can find online, cats aren’t that hard to train. Although they do present different obstacles from other animals.
We have a couple fairly new cats around the house. I really didn’t want them, but we got them. Two of them. And I’ll admit I like them. But there are a few rules I would like to establish.
Some things would be far easier than others. For instance, if you were trying to train a cat to stick it’s butt in your face at 5:00 AM, that would be no problem. But what I really want them to do is stop killing the toilet paper and maybe a few other things that seem to enjoy shredding. Like paper bags. Or paper anything. They may not see the point of the stuff, but some of us find it handy.
They say to use positive reinforcement and not negative. So the idea of using a spray bottle on the cat is out the window. Although the idea of squirting cats was tempting, I will say. I also thought about a Nerf gun. We have plenty around the house and the idea of shooting a cat when it did something I didn’t want it to do was also appealing. But there is a problem with that. The cats have most of the Nerf ammo. They seem to think long thin foam cylinders make great cat toys. So making a deal with the cats to get something to control cat behavior is probably not going to work.
And while negative reinforcement might sound fun in some ways, it doesn’t usually stop cats from doing what they want. They just don’t do it in front of you.
You are supposed to offer them treats as a training tool. I’m not sure how you reward a cat for not ripping things to shreds. I’m not convinced they would get the concept of being rewarded for not doing something.
There are a lot of things about them I do like that they do. I even don’t mind them climbing me and riding around the house on my shoulders, even if their pointy little claws dig in a bit. But could they just stop using those claws to shred things?
We even have a scratching post do they can use their claws on something we don’t mind being shredded. They didn’t scratch it. They tackled it. Often enough and hard enough that it can no longer be called a post. More of a log.
But cats being the rather independent creatures that they are, it’s not easy to teach them things.
Might be easier to install a bidet.
