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Teach Your Cat Some Tricks - Shaking Hands

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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 re...
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The World According to Cat - Part I

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We may easily overlook the simple fact that cats live in a world that is subjectively speaking quite distinct from ours. We share just enough overlap between our different perceptions of the world to be able to relate to one another, each species having evolved its senses to fit its lifestyle. It is unreasonable to consider cats’ abilities as inferior or superior to our own. Biologists abandoned the idea of one species being “superior” to another decade ago, though cat owners may suspect that their cats feel otherwise. We now consider each species as having evolved to fit a particular way of life; cats are good at being cats, because their ancestors evolved sense organs and brains to suit that role. Because the domestication of the cat is still incomplete, that role is still in a state of flux, for example, cats are still adapting to urban living while their sense organs have remained more or less unchanged. One major difference between cats and people...
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The World According to Cat - Part II

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Human eyes and cat eyes share some similarities we are both mammals, after all, but cat eyes have evolved as superefficient aids to hunting prey. The wild ancestors of the modern cat needed to maximize the time they could spend hunting, so their eyes enabled them to see the merest glimmer of light. This has affected the structure of cats’ eyes in several ways. First, they are huge in comparison with the size of their heads; indeed, their eyes are almost the same actual size as our own. In the darkness, their pupils expand to three times the area ours do. A reflective layer behind the retina, known as the tapetum, further enhances the efficiency with which their eyes capture light. Any incoming light that misses the receptor cells in retina bounces off the tapetum and back through the retina again, where some will happen to strike a receptor cell from behind, enhancing the sensitivity of the eye by up to 40 %. Any light that misses the second time around will pass ...
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