Sarah Whitehead looks at the principles of training



AS ONE AMERICAN dog trainer once said to me, if you really want to be an excellent trainer, practise on a cat or a chicken! Actually, this is not too far from the truth. In order to hone the best possible training skills, either of these species can be brilliant educators.

Cats can be trained to perform basic exercises, such as sit or how to use the cat flap, as well as more complex behaviours such as giving a paw, the retrieve or sitting in a meer­cat position. However, for the majority of pet owners, training may be a more important route towards grooming their cat, examining him or her to check teeth, coat and claws, or simply to call him in at night.

Training cats is a delicate and time-consuming process. Whether the goal is to groom the cat or to teach him or her a trick, it always needs to be done at the cat's own pace.

Punishment is completely out of the question — cats will either walk away or show anxiety if this is used in even its mildest form. Scolding, shouting, physical punishment and even withholding the reward at the wrong time can all seriously affect your relationship with your cat and can mean that he or she begins to view next door with more and more expectation! This is because cats do not rely on a social structure to survive, as dogs do. Instead, all training needs to be reward-based, with a particular emphasis on clear signals and excellent timing.

For this reason, clicker training principles can be extremely useful in modifying cat behaviour. The clicker is becoming well known in dog training to indicate to the dog the exact action that earned the reward. A small plastic box, it contains a flexible steel plate, which when pressed makes a double click sound. This is highly distinctive and accurate, and makes the `marking' of a specific behaviour much more obvious for animal and trainer than the use of the voice alone. This means that reliance on the actual reward is lessened, as once the cat has made the association between the click and the reward, he or she will understand that the signal `marks' the correct behaviour, while the reward comes later. What that reward is will always depend on the cat itself. My own `study case' will work for high-quality titbits, such as tiny pieces of cooked chicken. He also enjoys a game chasing a piece of string. However, to expect him to work for praise and affection alone is like asking me to work for a reward of dry cream crackers!

Having established a suitable reward, and decided on the marker signal that is going to be used, it is then important to break down the task into small stages. Training a cat to come through the cat flap is a good example of this as initially you will need to teach the cat to walk through the hole in the door by propping the flap right open. Mark the behaviour each time he gets it right by using the clicker or a specific word as a marker, then feeding a treat. When the cat is confidently walking both in and out of the opening, the flap needs to be lowered slightly. He will then need to learn that to walk through, pushing on the flap is required. This needs to be marked and rewarded over a number of repetitions. Finally, the cat will need to understand that even when the flap is fully closed, pushing will allow him to walk through to get the success signal and his reward. As with all well-learned behaviours, this action then becomes self-rewarding. Your cat needs to go to the toilet so goes out through the flap and is rewarded by relief; he's hungry, so coming in is rewarded by food, and so on. This means that the correct behaviour no longer needs external rewards to maintain it, actually using the flap on a day-to-day basis is intrinsically rewarding.

Of course, training is a two-way street! As fast as we are attempting to communicate appropriate behaviours to our cats, they are training us as well! However, at least if the basic principles behind successful training are understood, we can see how they are doing it!

IF YOU WANT TO TRAIN YOUR CAT