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Teach Your Cat Some Tricks : Jumping Pole

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Before teaching your cat to jump over a pole, you’ll need the right prop. In this case, the prop is a simple pole. You can be innovative when finding the perfect pole for your cat. A wooden dowel of 1 to 2 inches in diameter will work. Hollow cardboard tubes used for wrapping paper are also great for this trick. The first object I converted into a jumping pole was a cardboard tube that I wrapped with leopard-spotted paper for effect. It was perfect. Because you want to wow your audience, have a beginning to each trick. Starting the pole-jumping trick with your cat in a sitting position looks polished and formal. Start simple. First, ask your cat to sit, then place the pole on the floor for your cat to walk over. As she walks over it, capture the behavior by clicking and immediately treating. If your cat doesn’t walk over the pole, tap the target on the other side of the pole. By now your cat is well target-trained and will walk over the pole toward the target. Just as s...
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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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