Teach Your Cat Some Tricks - Shaking Hands

Shaking hands is an entertaining and impressive trick. Not too many people can boast of walking up to a cat, extending a hand, and having it met with a paw.

It is a fun trick to teach, though it may take a few sessions until your cat can successfully perform it.

Before learning to shake hands, your cat needs to be able to sit on cue.

Teaching your cat to shake hands can be accomplished through a few clicker techniques. After cuing her into a sit, watch her. If your cat happens to raise her right paw up, capture the movement with a click and then immediately give her a treat. In clicker-speak, this is called capturing behavior.

 It’s a way of reinforcing a naturally occurring behavior without a prompt or cue. Each time she raises her paw, click and treat her. Add the visual cue of extending your right open palm to her left paw.

Depending on how eager the cat is to learn, this technique can take many repetitions until she understands that raising her paw is reinforced and rewarded with a click and a treat.

Before you can teach your cat how to shake hands, she will need to know how to sit on request for a short length of time.

Shaping is another effective clicker-training technique. Shaping behaviors is subtler and involves clicking and then treating for minute movements that move closer and closer to the goal behavior.

At first, the movement might only be a simple shift of weight in preparation for lifting the paw, or a slight elevation of the paw. Just as she is raising her paw or shifting her weight while still sitting, mark the event with a click and then treat her.

Every time a movement takes her successively closer to shaking hands, click and treat. It can take many repetitions and a couple of sessions until she starts lifting her paw up to the level you want. Be patient, and shape in baby steps.

Don’t forget the visual cue of extending your palm toward her paw. Because shaking hands is done right-handed and right pawed, make sure that you click and treat only when her right paw is moving. If she moves her left paw, or doesn’t move at all, don’t click and don’t treat.

You can also first prompt her to raise her paw by touching her right paw with your right hand. If she’s a typical cat, she’ll respond by lifting her paw. The slightest paw movement upward needs to be shaped with a click as it’s occurring.

Your extended hand will become the cue for shaking hands. Whatever method you use to train her to shake hands, the visual cue should be extending an open palm that faces left, toward your cat’s right paw.

When she raises her paw to meet your hand, click and treat. After she correctly shakes hands eight out of ten times, add a verbal cue such as shake hands or hello as you extend your hand toward her paw.

Be careful that you don’t become sloppy and create a training problem by accidentally clicking when your cat puts her paw up while moving around or standing up.

 It’s easy to get excited while training cats. You might click a perfect paw move but forget that the cat is supposed to be sitting down while she is raising her paw to your hand. Click and treat for each small movement that takes your cat closer to the goal behavior of shaking hands. Cats are individuals; they learn at their own pace. If your cat seems stuck and just not noticing what you are asking, review your methods.

You may need to take smaller steps while shaping the behavior for her to learn the new behavior. Or, perhaps you are clicking too slowly or too soon. Maybe the treat isn’t motivating enough, or maybe your clicks are too random for your little Einstein and you aren’t shaping toward the final behavior goal.