Cat Training Made Easy

Training Your Cat

When people talk about training their pet, the most common animal which comes to mind is a dog right? Well, for all cat lovers like myself, i can tell you that cats are as easy to train as it's canine pal. But one wouldn't really consider it to be, well, training cats. It is more like having the best way to communicate with the animal. What many pet owners must realize is that different type of animals will train or communicate at different levels and therefore will react differently to similar commands and sounds. Lets look at the general training mechanism as it relates to communication with your cat. The three (3) things animal responds to in training is:

Sound
You cat is in tuned to different sounds and the tone of that sound. Training you cat involves giving commands in different tones of sound so the animal will know  your feeling behind the command. For example, If you are giving the command for your cat to stop doing something such as scratching on the sofa, your tone for saying the word stop must come off very authoritative. You cannot be laughing away while the cat scratches the sofa, taking pictures and then mildly telling the cat to stop while still petting him. The Stop tone should come off with authority at the same time restrain your pet cat from the sofa.

Sight
So you want to train your cat with some basic commands in the beginning. Your cat can learn what certain action means by seeing you as the pet owner perform these actions while giving the sound command. So lets say you want your cat to run to you when you say the words "Come to me". You must first have an action involved with the words "Come to me" so your cat can see and understand what you want him to do. The way to do this is to mimic a running action while saying the command. Animals have good instincts and they know the difference between running and walking. When you do this a couple of times it will eventually begin to soak in the cats head.

Action
Have you ever heard the saying, "Monkey see monkey do" This saying is actually talking about mimicking. Mimicking is when someone or something copies the action or characteristics of an object, animal or person. So how does action or mimicking helps to train your cat? It is simple, what your cat sees other cats do, it will follow. So one of the best ways to actually train your cat is to let him mimic a cat already properly trained. There are three ways to accomplish this:

• Have someone with a trained cat come over and allow the pet owner to execute his commands to his pet.  If your cat is interested in the other cat, he may just follow those commands instinctively without even noticing. Then you too will need to do some mimicking yourself. Copy all the commands and say them to your cat. This will take a bit of time, but training your pet does require some amount of patience.
  
  
• Get a good cat training video and if your cat watches the television with you, just put in the video and have the animal sit and watch. Then you must now execute what you have learned on these videos. This may come a bit more easy in training your cat as these videos are normally put together by professional people who have years under their belts when it comes on to cat ownership and training.
  
  
• Clicker Training: This is probably the best cat training mechanism right now. Karen Pryor has come up with one of the most unique ways that allows you to train your cat while having fun. Oh, the cat also has fun too! The clicker training is like a action and reward module. If the cat does something really good, it gets rewarded with clicks and often times a treat. If you want to know more about this new phenomenon in cat training just follow the link to Karen Pryor's Clicker Cat Training Site