Moving Is A Pain In The Pooper

Thank dog that all of my fuzzy fam­ily is trained! Many of you know I am mov­ing. And I’m sure all of you know just how much fun it is to move. Well the other day the front door didn’t get shut all the way and every last ani­mal I own was in my front yard — all three cats and the dog. Right there was one of those times you smile. Instead of going into a panic, you thank your­self for putting the time into train­ing. Within one minute every­one was back inside get­ting treats and pet­ting. My friends who were there know me as the behav­ior nerd who likes to train all sorts of ani­mals and didn’t think twice about it. When I men­tioned it to other peo­ple, the part about my dog com­ing when called wasn’t all that impres­sive, but the fact all my cats are trained seemed to “wow” people.

Train­ing my cats was just as easy as train­ing my dog. The best recall I find to teach cats is tar­get. They are also trained a gen­eral recall the same way I taught my dog through shap­ing. I hon­estly don’t know how cat train­ing is all that impres­sive. Cats are just as happy to learn behav­iors for pay as dogs.

One of my cats is a tuna whore and the other two love turkey. I still keep treats inter­est­ing or lim­ited so they hold their value. And the rule of “keep train­ing ses­sions short” is crit­i­cal to remem­ber when cat train­ing. I started off just shak­ing the kitty treat jar and then giv­ing them all a few treats. They under­stood that sound in about a week. The can opener just about trained itself through clas­si­cal con­di­tion­ing. And train­ing Tar­get with clicker train­ing was a cinch.

Even­tu­ally I need to get every­one trained to a silent whis­tle (shoe maker’s kids huh?).